Will Take Advantage of You - Real Estate Appraiser RSDS Employee Review

Wonderful support. Great benefits. Fantastic co-workers. Positive culture. Steady workflow.

A handful of clients pay below reasonable & customary rates.

Some of the team and other appraisers are supportive when you have a question. The CEO often encourages everyone in the chat, but words can only go so far. These are things independent appraisers/appraiser peers can provide too.

Fee split is not good. This company is really just replicating the AMC model in a different way. They also work with AMCs, so you can imagine the fees on those assignments are even worse. Also, they let their clients pretty much walk all over you. Expect to constantly hear about your scorecard and impending doom if you get one single late assignment or too many revisions and for their clients to send your ridiculous ROV requests just because they can. After the ROV request, expect a "wink wink nudge nudge" revision where they're trying to get you to move the value up or explain why you didn't include their data again. Revisions wouldn't be such a big deal if they were ONLY actual errors in the appraisal but instead they can just be extremely specific questions about a tiny ding in the wall or something that the underwriter decided was a potential issue and now your scorecard is being hurt because of nit-picking. Management claims they fight these revisions to keep your scorecard up, but the clients can still ask super specific questions and those have to be answered as revisions. Even if the revision is later cleared, there's no transparency about how their clients mark appraisers deficient whenever they want. One of their biggest clients who always does this kind of stuff has a new change or increase in expectations every month and it gets old fast. I also felt a bit of a fake culture and got my expectations up about how I would be treated when it mattered. Overall, appraisers should just stay independent. These companies exist because appraisers allow them to and they only serve the mortgage industry. If you are still required to bid, compete with other appraisers, and your income is completely dependent on production, why should you be splitting your fee?