My comments: I guess a lot of appraisers are busy now. Too bad the poll did not include longer times. I am at 2-3 weeks now. AMCs that promised their lender clients 1-2 days turn times without giving a significant increase in the appraisal fee are in trouble ;> As we all know, turn time depends mostly on how busy we are and significantly changes over time. Residential lender appraising is a boom and bust business.
Denver Colorado here – I’m at 4-5 weeks out. Admittedly, probably 80% of my work is rural so there are fewer of us out there willing to make the drives necessary (shooting 5 comps on a property yesterday took over an hour). Raising fees (I’m charging $550-$600 for a conv and $600-$650 for FHA) has not slowed down the orders.
I agree that “forecasting” a delivery date that far out is ludicrous but AMC’s insist on it. You really don’t know whats going to happen that far out. I had two orders last week that took a total of 6 days between them to write. That wasn’t planned for in the scheduling and scheduled inspections still had to happen. So now I’ve got 5 orders that will be 4-5 days on write up post inspection. I’ve gone to only scheduling 4 assignments a week and due dates only on Fridays to try and stay caught up. In 24 years this is the busiest I’ve ever been.
Whew, I’m glad to hear you say you are also running 2-3 weeks, the pole didn’t reflect that. I do the inspection immediately (or withing a few days) and complete the orders in the order I inspected them. Lenders/AMC’s always want you to give a turn time, but who knows how many reports will come in, so essentially they want you to forcast the future. I have started to turn alot of reports down now, so I can get the pile on my desk whittled down to a resonable stack before I take on more. I’d be curious how other appraisers manage their workload!