What to do When You Don’t Get Sufficient Upfront Information

If I had a dollar for each time that a potential client did not give me the relevant property characteristics I would have a lot of extra money.  The problem isn’t always that a potential client lied to me or hid information, sometimes the just didn’t know how important what they didn’t tell me was.

Often potential client’s forget to talk about things like excess land, “oh yeah we have a large yard,” or they forgot to mention that they have a casita, or they forgot to mention that the property is zoned for a single-family use but it is being used as a group home.  Yes, those things make a difference to appraisers.

When you get to the geodesic dome home owners you usually get a warning because they have already been rejected by three appraisers before they called you.  I have looked through thousands and thousands of homes looking for comparable sales for dome homes and found none they are truly difficult appraisals when it comes to market data.

Then there are those who forgot to tell you that the appraisal is for probate or for a civil suit.  I guess some people just assume that everything an appraiser does is court ready.  I have had people ask me “we can just use this in court, right?”  Not.  If it wasn’t completed for that use why would an appraiser finishing a report for estate valuation prepare it as if two attorneys and a judge were going to be reviewing it?

The worst case scenario is having someone tell you things about a property that make it sound normal or typical but when you drive up to it you find out that it’s not, because it’s hard to ask for a larger fee after you have arrived and it’s hard to reject an assignment after you have invest time in research and travel.  Sometimes however it’s just better to cut your losses than to charge forward into a complex assignment that you are going to be doing for a ridiculously low fee.

I generally take a hard look at a property via the Internet before I drive to look at it.  Our Assessor provides great information and you can look at many properties using Google Maps, so why not do it?  Using that information has saved me from a lot of surprises, but not all.

One “gotcha moment” can happen when a potential client tells you about they have a fractional interest in a property after you arrive and inspect it.  Things like golf course frontage, a location in a guard-gated community and / or frontage on a common-area that could or could not be considered an amenity is typical in my market and these factors can influence market value.

One of the great things about my area (Henderson, Nevada) is that there is a great deal of conformity within each tract-home subdivision or development.  The problem is that appraisers come to rely on sales and even “model-matched” sales in the same subdivision, but there are times when there are very few or no single-family residential home sales in the subdivision that you need.  So you have the potential to find a few of the 30 to 100 or more homes in a subdivision with similar location, similar size, similar construction, similar construction quality and similar amenities but there may be absolutely none.  Once you move to investigating other subdivisions in close proximity you can find that everything is different.

There are some mortgage lenders and appraisal management companies (AMCs) who don’t know, or don’t collect sufficient information to know, important details regarding each property that they seek an appraisal on.  So appraisers have to watch out for themselves.  No one is going to take responsibility for the fact that an assignment is complex but the suggested fee is almost always based on a typical or simple assignment.

It’s easy to just accept them all and deal with the fact that some reports will end up being complex, but sooner or later you will figure out that someone is routing you a higher and higher percentage of the complex assignments and you will have to tell someone to STOP.

For more appraisal information contact Glenn J. Rigdon MA, MRICS, IFAS, ASA who is a Las Vegas / Henderson Nevada based broker and appraiser who can be contacted via email or via his business website known as Appraiser Las Vegas  (http://www.appraiserlasvegas.com), or http://www.horizonvillageappraisal.com, or you can also click on “Contact Us” on the home page of this website or visit my public profile at LinkedIn at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/glenn-rigdon-ma-mrics-asa/1a/30b/879/

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