Working for national firm vs. yourself

[Michael S]

Good for you. I assume your ecommerce business is outside the appraisal field. My wife and kids helped me market my appraisal business in years past. It was a family business.

My suggestion: Keep your appraisal license as long as you can. Consider it an insurance policy. My wife was a public accountant and gave up her profession to homeschool the kids. She helped me on bids, analysis, HBU and taxes. My wife kept her license until I retired 4 yrs ago, then she let her's expire. It worked well for my family. My kids helped do some of the mundane things in a report (securing plat maps, flood maps, property profiles, calling owners to verify a sale, etc.).

I kept my license for about a year but when I considered the opportunity cost of keeping it was probably $1,000/year between CE, missed work to take the CE, and renewal fees it just didn't make sense. Also, it's pretty hard to just jump back into commercial work as an independent. Especially in a non-disclosure state. Half my time was just trying to get data as anything from CoStar was garbage and almost any real comp/market data had to come from a direct party to the transaction (buyer/seller/broker). It took years to build up my local network of brokers, investors, and other appraisers and that's all stale now - and all the comps I verified are no longer accessible to me.