Appraisal Articles

At our real estate and appraisal firm we have done something that most appraisers would consider business suicide… We have pulled all of our advertising in the phone book, no more links to our  online pages,  and we have eliminated all online advertising on “AppraisersRSomethingOrOther.com”

Can you believe it?

It seems like a bad idea at first, but let me digress a bit.

One, phone book ads are massively overpriced, our last year’s ‘renewal’ was going to cost us $1300 for a year. That is nearly what our Alamode Wintotal runs us for a year, and they give a whole lot more bang for the buck!

Two, anyone who is in the appraisal field for at least a week knows that the calls you get off the internet are completely useless. They either want FREE APPRAISALS, which they call pre-comps, or on the rare occasion we do an actual appraisal, they pay so badly we had to quit doing all of them except those paid at the door.

Note to newbie appraisers, if these out of state lenders are not registered on the NCCOB website as a company licensed to do business in NC, you will have no recourse for going after them when they don’t pay… Hard lesson learned here, look them up before taking the assignment, get paid at the door, and make sure the check cashes before you send the report. Bounced checks are really hard to collect with out of state lenders that already have the appraisal report marked as “PAID”.

Three, if we get one more fax saying that we have been Automatically Renewed by a www.com advertising, and that our credit card has already been charged, I cannot promise to be civil.

Four, once a week we get calls that offer to “help market our company better…” Now I just cut them off by saying, “Thanks, but we don’t need any more business, we are busy enough without advertising.” This stops most of them cold, but a hardy few press on, to which we say, “Why would we take advice from someone who is not an appraiser or after failing in the appraisal field decided to go into marketing?” Not pleasant, I agree, but these calls usually come in on my cell phone eating away at my minutes.

And so far it has worked, we don’t miss having to explain our policies, we don’t miss the bill from the Yellow Pages, and we certainly don’t miss trying to collect from deadbeats...

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Amanda Rivera