From Dealerships to AMCs: Tech Fees as the New Normal
Last year I went to the dealership for a simple oil change. Nothing dramatic. I was prepared to drink bad waiting room coffee, scroll my phone, and leave. Instead, the service rep came out with the classic “while we had it up on the lift” routine and told me I needed new brakes. Fine. I approved the $1,200 estimate. Not fun, but expected. When the work was done, I went to pay and noticed a mysterious $60 surcharge added to the invoice. I asked what it was, and the cashier said it was a credit card fee, a five percent add‑on for using the most common form of payment on earth. I told her to call the service rep because I wasn’t accepting a surprise fee at the finish line. He explained that if I paid cash or wrote a check, the fee would be removed. I told him that nobody walks around with $1,200 in cash and that the last time I saw a checkbook was probably in a museum, and more importantly, if I had been told about this policy upfront, I would have taken my car somewhere else. He offered a coupon to offset the fee, and I paid the bill, but I also told him to let the manager know that if they insisted on keeping this nonsense, they’d be doing it without my business. A few days later, the manager called to say the fee had been eliminated entirely… proof that one person refusing to play along can make an entire policy fall apart faster than a cheap umbrella in a windstorm.
Since then, I have noticed the same creeping behavior everywhere. Restaurants adding fees for ordering online. A vet slipping in a credit card fee without mentioning it. Businesses inventing new charges for things that used to be part of their normal operating costs. At this rate, the next line item will probably be a “keep the lights on” fee so we can help them pay their electric bill.
And that brings me to AMCs and their beloved tech fees.
Chase Pursley recently asked on LinkedIn why appraisers tolerate portal fees and what other industry gets to pass its cost of doing business down as a line item. Appraisers chimed in with everything from frustration to fatalism. One said fighting tech fees is like changing the radio station while driving toward a cliff. Another said they have never understood how AMCs justify passing their operating costs to the appraiser, especially when AMCs are acting as the lender’s agent.
And here is the part that makes AMC tech fees even more absurd than the dealership’s credit card surcharge: at least the dealership was charging its own customer. AMCs are charging appraisers, who are not their customers at all. Borrowers pay for the appraisal. Lenders hire the AMC. Yet somehow the AMC’s cost of doing business gets pushed onto the only party who isn’t their customer but is still required to use their system if they want the work.
Tech fees became permanent because appraisers didn’t fight them early on. Many assumed they could simply raise their appraisal fee to offset the cost, but AMCs immediately did what AMCs always do: they shopped for whoever would accept the lowest fee with the least resistance. And now tech fees have multiplied into every imaginable form. Some AMCs charge per order. Some charge per upload. Some charge for access to their system. And some, like ValueLink, have added a monthly subscription on top of everything else. A subscription. Before you can even invoice.
It’s the same pattern as the dealership, but with a twist: a business expense gets shifted onto someone who accepted it not out of enthusiasm, but because refusing meant being cut out of the workflow entirely.
If the person pays it, the fee stays. If enough people push back, the fee disappears. The difference is that appraisers rarely push back because they fear losing the order, and that silence became permission. And once a fee becomes normalized, it becomes permanent.
The moral is simple: fees grow in silence. The moment someone says no, the whole setup starts to shake. The dealership backed down because one customer refused to be quietly taxed. AMCs will keep shifting their costs onto appraisers until appraisers decide they’re done subsidizing someone else’s business model and finally push back.
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Thanks for saying this out loud. I refuse to pay any tech fees. If a fee appears after an order is accepted, I return the order to the AMC and state they should reassign because I never agreed to a tech fee. This always appears after I’ve accepted an assignment, never mentioned beforehand. My fee is always increased to accommodate the bullshit fee. Thank goodness private work is now outnumbering lending assignments.
The ValueLink one is especially nefarious because in order to receive orders from YOUR clients on that platform, you must now pay a “subscription” fee – for the damn platform that the client chose. Why is the client not eating this cost and building it into the appraisal fee? How is that ethical or even legal (good question for a lawyer)?
There is also the fact that these “tech fees” should be disclosed in the appraisal as it is a fee that must be paid in order to procure the assignment. How many are disclose the fees in their appraisal?