Hi David,

Thank you very much for that note. I really appreciate you writing it and giving us the chance to make it right for you. Looking forward to a great partnership with you.

If you have any needs in the future please reach out to me or my Director of Vendor Management Lisa Ratzke. lisa.ratzke@incenterms.com

Thank you!

I want to say thank you for your exemplary communication and follow on payment (received as promised). Your companies unfortunate situation and delay was heart-felt, we really were unjustified in jumping to conclusion. Guess the reaction can best be summed up as some scary situation though to be a Halloween Trick that turned into a treat. Thanks for your efforts and communication, your a manager high above the common AMC and a breath of fresh air in this industry. A professional of dedicated commitment in manager skills, we have no reservation in doing business with Incenter Appraisal Management in the future

David Schuller
Appraiser

Hi David – one more update for you. Finance Dept Manager emailed me to say she will get that order queued up to pay on the 11am ACH run tomorrow 10/29. that means you will see the post hit your bank by the evening of the 29th as a pending deposit, and your bank will clear it in whatever it’s normal time is. I’ll follow up tomorrow once the payment has posted and let you know. Take care.
~ M

Hi David, I understand. And again, I too am sorry the situation impacted you and your payment on this order. my email is mark.walser@incenterms.com – appreciate your words and I’ve already corresponded with our finance department tonight and we’ll get that payment out tomorrow morning and update you. Will you be at Appraisal Summit, our team will be there and would love to meet you.

Thanks
Mark

https://www.appraisalsummit.net/sponsor-exhibit — here’s our booth info.

Thanks for the response and we are deeply sorry for your staff injuries. This post was prior to your response on LinkedIn. We had poor or vague response in our calls to accounts at AIM and this is reasoning we post alarm for other appraisers when nothing was happening.

We can say as an appraiser in this industry for over 45 years we have lost substantial fees from AMC and Loan companies that closed or just vanished. We welcome your payment as to the engagement agreement automatically deposited or the method setup.

Thanks again
David Schuller
Appraiser

Wow David where have we heard that excuse before…hmmm It’s one of the oldest excuses in the book. If I had the time I would list previous AMC’s that went bankrupt. Happened to me only twice and that was 6 years ago and after that made sure it won’t happen again.

Hi Dave – you emailed me tonight with your concerns and your criticism. I responded to your email with a direct and open response on the tragedy our company endured, how that impacted our 24 hour pay, and why your payment was missed. I have offered to remedy it and wire your payment or Fedex overnight you a check and offered a straightforward explanation as to why your 2nd order with us was not paid (by your own admission, your first one was “Smooth”).

Then you come on and post this just a few minutes after my response to you – which is really disappointing. I will still ensure you are paid via wire or FedEx overnight as promised in my email. I challenge you to complete one more order for us and come back on here and tell everyone how fast you were paid. Even with the issue on your 2nd order, we’ll still pay you faster than most AMCs.

I am not here to cross swords with appraisers, but I would expect some understanding based on my response to you. My team is still out on medical leave after that incident, but our finance department picked this up and is handling all the payments for all of our appraisers. As stated to you in our email, payments are processed twice daily at 11am and 4pm EST, Monday thru Friday.

Please contact me with further questions.

Thank you
Mark Walser

Thank you so much for the kind words. We truly are striving to make a difference in the AMC realm. We do value our appraiser partners and want them to feel the love. As stated, we are not perfect. I don’t know anyone who is, but as an appraiser I definately would have liked to have an AMC like Incenter to work for when I was still taking assignments. Our appraiser partners for the most part compliment our staff and like working for us, they do love the 24 hour pay and perks we offer as well. If you ever decide to take on some AMC work, please reach out, we would love to have you as a partner. Best wishes and all our best!

Mark, respectfully If $125 is your ‘aspirational margin’ then you are overcharging! The margin I’m told about is $75 (break-even).

Any AMC that requires a (gross) fee above $125 should be pushing for “Cost Plus” fees with their lender clients and should STOP attempting to steal it from the “appraisers fee” that many lenders have price fixed at $650 already!

At $75 each (net) the AMC is running around $56,250 profit per month (for an average of 25 per day x 30 days). That means there is another $56k expense budget. Any business that needs more than $56k per month to cover administrative expenses for only 750 orders per month shouldn’t be in the business.

Larger AMCs with 100 or more orders per day would be grossing $375,000 per month. If it takes more than half that per month to cover overhead and salaries then someone is not a very efficient ‘manager’; or they have a bloated overhead.

Agreed – that’s about right. $125 is the “aspirational margin.” We don’t always make that. Once you subtract personnel SG&A, time, costs, fees, licensing, technology, infrastructure, overhead, you get lucky if you put about 20% of that to the bottom.

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the question. The answer to your question is that we push back. There are lenders we have turned down work on behalf of because we know the fee structure they are trying to get us to work in is not reasonable. Knowing that we have our averages from appraisers and that we check our averages in every state and re-calibrate our fees accordingly, we will let a lender know that the fees they are seeking are not reasonable, and that we will not have success finding appraisers to take work for those fees. We suggest our higher fee and explain that the majority of it is for the appraiser, and that in the triangle of Price, Quality, or Turntime, you have to give on one of them to get the other two.

Now – like any AMC there have been business propositions put to us to work within a thinner AMC fee structure at a lower pricepoint. When that happens we don’t take it out on the appraiser, we lower our margins and take the smaller fee per file in exchange for volume. I am still flabbergasted by some of the posts here where appraisers are working with AMCs that pay $275 or $300 for an appraisal fee for a normal 1004. Our average is much higher than that in all 50 states.

WOW! I had an AMC beg (bother) me for two weeks to take an appraisal from them because they had no one to accept it. Finally I said ok after talking directly to an agent from the company (large, but I won’t get into who).

When I reached out to the Borrower in this re-fi transaction and told him who I was he chuckled and stated he canceled the order because he was not paying $1,200 for a non-complex appraisal. He asked if that was my fee and I told him no.

I did not mention to him, but that fee was 45% over my fee. I tore up the order and won’t be taking anymore from that company. There’s no reason, in my opinion, for that fee just to pass through an order.

The cash flow is very easy to deal with unless they were undercapitalized, to begin with.

You collect a fee from a borrower for a specific property. You set aside the appraiser portion and don’t comingle it with your business operating expenses.

I’ve got friends that own AMCs, and THEIR profit margin isn’t all that narrow. Most AMC fees they collect run about $125.

Mark, please tell us how your ‘appraiser sets their own fee’ model fits within the lender’s price-fixing pre-determined fee quoted to borrowers long before the appraiser is ever consulted about a specific property’s complexities? (The fee listed in the GFE)

For example, a lenders fixed fee is $650 (including a $125 AMC fee) and the assignment is complex and requires a net appraiser fee of $1500 to $3000.

Or perhaps less extreme at say $950? I’ve found very few appraisers that can cite a significantly higher ‘reasonable fee’ without the amc canceling that order.

Thank you.

Agreed, and we pay far faster than that – some states have 30 day statutes! In any event Judith, please let me know if there were any appraisals you were not paid for, and I hope you will consider doing business with us again. If you do, please check out and sign up for our 24 hour pay, nothing like this ever happens with that payment – no mail to lose, no delays or disasters knocking out deliveries, you just get paid within 24 hours after we deliver the report to the client. It’s free, fast and easy.

Thank you for engaging with me and reach out to Lisa Ratzke (lisa.ratzke@incenterms.com) if you would like to get that going.

Best,
Mark Walser, President

That is America isn’t it Bill 🙂 We all have the choice to engage or not, and nobody can force us to – it’s really a great thing! I can tell you one last thing from my end, understanding the profit model. We don’t force appraisers into a pre-defined fee structure. Appraisers tell us what their C&R fees are, and we build out our fee on top of that and transparently disclose to the lender what we make on each report, and what we paid you. I think that keeps everybody honest, and our lender partners can see that we are charging a fair fee for our services, while our appraiser partners know that they aren’t going to get lowballed. I will certainly say hi to Joan :-), she’s a great lady! We are a CRN and Clearbox sponsor, and I encourage you to keep an eye on AppraisalBuzz today.

Hope to meet you at a future event and will continue engaging transparently here on the Appraiserblogs.

Thank you Steve – we appreciate the kind words!