I have never been approached by an RE yet saying I charge to much or try to haggle my price down. Its no magic potion just a different way to price the work we do and add more value to a home inspection.
YET may be the operative word.
I guess i don’t have such a wonderful pair of rose colored glasses.
Cheers
WOW I think we ran about 40% wanting a lower price .
We from the get go charged more then our competition and still charged more when we retired .
I think some home inspectors have no idea what it cost’s them to do an inspection .
Our accountant did a break down for us and said in about 2004 our cost was about $128.00 per inspection .
. It would be interesting to know what the cost would be now .
Not true Yuri. My Wife works for an Appraisal company, and they are all very well qualified. The senior appraiser could give many a home inspector a run for their money when it comes to the technical issues in a home, and the others in the practice aren’t far behind.
When you look at the requirements for membership and certification of AIC or CNAREA you will find they are much stricter with their profession than we are with ours, demand more accountability and higher standards of professionalism. It is a model that we should aspire to.
It’s time we realised that our profession is a bit of a sh1t-sh0w, and there are too many inadequately skilled people in it, and too few real professionals.
When we can sort our own mess out then, in my opinion, we will have the right to point fingers.
WE saw lots of Appraisers and they all did not spend enough time in the home to get all the info they need to do a proper job ,
never say an appraiser with a ladder they never went into attic or walked the roof or opened an electric panel or did a crawl space .
Yes talked to many and they all said they had too many homes to inspect in a day to do a good job.
They all loved to get our info on what we had seen so they could get to the next job sooner
And the pay was a less per inspection then we got.
They say they had to do a lot of inspections in a day to make a reasonable living .
I have met only a handful of appraisers and my take on those was they were poorly informed in many ways, One had no clue on rural water systems yet was doing business in Gravenhurst. One had difficulty getting to a home and left because the water over the road in spring was" too deep" even though the realtor and client were on site already. He commented when they did get there days later that it was a hell of a place to chose to live and the many shacks ( they are summer cottages some quite nice) would depress the market price. Meanwhile on his best day he could not afford the poorest shack in that area he had no clue of the property values in the area. Another wrote in an appraisal the well was a dug well, it’s drilled to 180 ft depth with a submersible pump, and the home had laminate flooring throughout, it was solid 3/4 bamboo hardwood. Yes they have professional standards but that seem to allow them to just look up comparable prices in the area and work out a sq ft guess I think.
I haven’t personally had one done for me that came within 30 % of the real world price a buyer was willing to pay in the open market and I believe they do that solely to protect the bank’s interest.
Len, maybe your wife is qualified, maybe there are others who are qualified, I’m not arguing about this. However in my interaction with appraisers, I noticed that their time at the property was limited to 10-15 min. All they did was taking general area pictures. That is it. Also in 2009 I was working as an energy advisor for one of the licensed service organizations, whose main line of work was appraisal. A big company. Non of their appraisers knew how to distinguish high efficiency furnace from mid efficiency.
And all I’m saying is that (as Claude pointed out to me in another post) tarring all Appraisals with one brush because of your personal experience is not fair on the vast number of Appraisers that are qualified, and professional.
How would you like it if other professions suggested all Home Inspectors were incompetent just because of the experiences they’ve had with a Home Inspector?
Ooops! It looks like that’s already happened…silly me! 
Thanks Yuri that was our experience time on job almost running was 10-15 minutes and gone .
Len, at no point did I say that appraisers are not qualified in what they do. Put it simply - their job description is way different from home inspectors. They need to provide banks with the information to justify financing. They do not provide any technical details on the assessed properties. Having said this it does not mean that they are not capable of doing it but they will never do because this is not in their job description, and they have enough on their plate to run around in order to make a decent living.