Another day, another appraisal. Repeat.
If there’s a new appraisal manager in your department, what’s the first thing they’ll change? Ask the same question if you sold your appraisal firm.
Would they run it exactly the same way?
Bet money on that?
Better decisions
Annie Duke is the author of Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts. She uses a poker analogy to highlight uncertainty is present in most of our decisions. Become a better decision maker in order to embrace uncertainty and handle it.
Bad decisions don’t always result in bad outcomes. The opposite is true, good decisions don’t always result in good outcomes. When it comes to appraisal productivity, some rely heavily on what’s worked in the past. Ms. Duke calls it “resulting” where we tend to memorialize past actions as rigid decision templates going forward. This often leads to worse and worse decision quality over time.
For some, we haven’t considered productivity software for years. When we do find the time to evaluate solutions, the decision is often delayed due to a feeling of not having all the facts. Truth is we never have “all” the facts.
Lucky for life
Conventional wisdom dictates that the quality of outcomes is directly tied to the quality of our decisions. Luck is often ignored when evaluating a circumstance. A huge factor impacting our personal and professional lives is the quality of our decisions and luck.
What’s luck? Success or failure apparently brought by chance rather than through one’s own actions.
Step back to see where you’re going
If you’re on vacation, there’s an anticipation to the “start” of fun, often slowed down with the reality of delayed flights, car rentals and traffic. Once you get past the short-term frustrations and start to settle in, then the fun can happen.
That process of stepping back and taking in the entire picture of the vacation helps alleviate short-term anxieties of making the wrong decision. Years from now you’ll be talking about that vacation at parties. You’ll remember the great time you had and the decision to go, not the short term inconveniences.
Turnaround times have never been longer
The author talks about “temporal discounting” as a strategy for happiness. Dealing with what’s right in front of you right now can be short-sighted. We should zoom out on the timeline to get a clearer picture. She gives an analogy that everyone’s perception is that Berkshire Hathaway stock has always been trending upward for years and years. However. If you zoom in, you see fluctuations, up and down. Not always up.
Fee or bank appraisers are all saying the same thing right now. Turnaround times have never been longer. There’s pressure on the credit side from the C-Suite to “do what it takes” to speed things up.
“Exacerbated by the decline of appraisers and
high volume requires making better decisions imperative.”
Many commercial appraisal firms in the last few years have been bought out by national firms. The sellers of the firms mention the biggest change is established technology and process.
What’s at stake
For fee appraisers that don’t recognize that the national firms model is the future struggle to keep up. Quoting 6 to 8 weeks is causing pressure between lending and credit. Reduce operational bottlenecks and minimize bid to complete cycle-times with decisions that lead to action.
Don’t be busy, be effective
Move away from half-hazard use of software and process that diminish your success. Consider a decision on productivity tools for fee appraisers like DataComp Suite. Consider a decision with an appraisal and environmental workflow platform like YouConnect.
Are you confident that doing nothing is the best decision?
Get referrals from your peers. Make good decisions. Make your own luck.
Bet on it.
