All Virtual Meetings Start at 10:30am MT

Add These Meetings to Your Calendar

Well, it's here. By the time you read this, November 2 has come and gone or is a day away) and UAD 3.6 is no longer the thing we are getting ready for. It is the thing we are doing. If your first few reports under the new form felt slower and clumsier than you expected, you are right on schedule. Nobody is fast at this yet, including me.

At my own office we made the software switch I have been telling you about for months, and I am going to use this issue to talk about the part of that switch nobody warns you about, which is what happens to twenty years of old reports when you leave the program that created them. That is the Chalkboard this month, and if you are even thinking about changing platforms in the next year, read it before you cancel anything.

Also in this issue: a marketing lane most appraisers have never looked at, called Opportunity Zones, which just got a second life from Congress. And at the end, a story about two weeks in Europe with no laptop, which turned out to be the best thing I did for my business all year.

Let's get to work.

Let me ask you a question that sounds silly until you think about it. Who owns your old appraisal reports?

You do, obviously. You wrote them. They are on your hard drive. But try this: cancel your software license and then open one. On most platforms you can't. The file is still sitting there, but it is written in a format only that program can read, and the program stopped working the day your subscription did. You own the files the way you own a safe you lost the combination to.

THIS INCLUDES ALL THE BENEFITS IN THE ALL STAR TEAM!

That is the problem I ran into head on this fall when Peak Value moved to a new platform for 3.6. We have something like fifteen thousand reports going back more than three decades in the old system. USPAP says I have to keep a workfile for five years after I deliver a report, or two years after any court case involving it is finished, whichever is later. State boards can ask for any of them. A lender can come back three years later with a question. And none of that cares what software I use now.

So before anything else, I called the old company and asked the obvious question: can you convert my archive to PDFs on the way out? The honest answer, across the industry, is no. The big legacy vendors do not offer a bulk export. There is no button. A couple of them have effectively closed the door entirely, which means the appraisers still on those platforms are one lapsed renewal away from losing readable access to their own history. I am not telling you that to scare you. I am telling you because I found out the hard way, and the fix is cheap if you do it before you switch instead of after.

Here is how I handled it, and how I would tell you to handle it. Split your archive into two piles.

Pile one is the last five years. Those are the reports that are still inside the USPAP window, the ones a board or a lender could actually ask for. For those, you want a true copy of the report exactly as it was delivered, which means a PDF produced by the software that made it. Not a re-creation, not an export of the data, the actual document. Every platform I have seen can print a report to PDF one at a time from inside the program. It takes somewhere between forty-five seconds and a minute and a half per report once you get a rhythm. That sounds painful until you do the math. Five years of a one-person shop is maybe twelve hundred reports, which is a long weekend for an assistant with a podcast on. We handed the list to our AI, set up a folder structure by year and address, and let it grind through it in the background while the rest of us kept working. Nobody waited on it. It just got done.

Pile two is everything older than five years. You are outside the retention window, so you do not need the pretty document anymore, but I still wanted the information, because every one of those reports is a comp, a sketch, a set of photos, and a set of notes about a property in my market. For those we pulled out the underlying data and the workfile attachments and saved them in plain formats, the kind that will open in twenty years without asking for a license. If you are not technical, your software vendor's support line can usually walk you through exporting the data from a report even if they cannot do it in bulk, and the rest is a job for a trainee, a virtual assistant, or like us - AI.

Two rules that made this work. First, do it while you still have the license. The moment the old program stops opening, all of your options get expensive. If you are planning to leave a platform in the spring, start the PDF pile now, not the week you cancel. Second, name the files like a human will be looking for them in 2031. Address, then date. Not the order number, not the lender, not whatever cryptic ID the software assigned. Future you, standing in front of a board complaint, does not remember the order number.

One more thing while you are at it. When you talk to any new vendor, ask them straight out what they do with your legacy files. I asked mine, on a live call with my members, and I would encourage you to ask yours the same way. The answer tells you a lot about whether they have thought about what it means to be your software for the next twenty years, or just for the next renewal.

Your reports are your work product and your protection. Do not let them live in a format you do not control.

Let me guess. You've heard the term "Opportunity Zone" a hundred times and you still couldn't explain it to your kid. You're not alone. Most appraisers I talk to are in the same boat, so let's fix that, and then let's talk about why this is about to matter to your business.

Here's the whole idea in one sentence. The government picked a bunch of neighborhoods that need investment, usually lower-income areas, sometimes rural towns, and said if you invest your money in one of these places, we'll cut you a break on your taxes. That's it. That's an Opportunity Zone.

Think about it like this. Say you sold a business, or some stock, or a rental property, and you made a big profit. Normally the IRS wants a cut of that profit right away. But if you take that profit and put it into a project inside one of these designated zones, an apartment building, a redevelopment, new construction, whatever, the IRS says you can delay paying tax on it, and if you leave the money in long enough, you might not owe much on the new gains at all. It's a coupon for building in the right zip code.

That program has been around since 2017, but it was set to expire. Well, it just got extended and made permanent. Congress passed a new law last year, and the IRS just put out the transition rules for how the old version rolls into the new version, which everybody's calling Opportunity Zone 2.0, starting in 2027. The zones are getting redrawn, and this time there's an extra sweetener for rural areas, which is a big deal if you appraise outside a major metro.

Now here's the part that matters to you. A tax break doesn't make a bad project good. If the numbers don't work, the numbers don't work, tax break or not. Investors know this, which means they need somebody who can look at a piece of ground or a run-down building and tell them, honestly, whether it's worth building there before they wire the money. That's not a job for a CPA. That's a job for you.

THIS INCLUDES ALL THE BENEFITS FROM THE LOWER TIERS!

This is mostly a commercial and multifamily game, that's where the big money flows, but don't check out yet if you're residential. New construction and small-scale redevelopment inside a zone qualifies too, and rural OZ deals are wide open right now because nobody out there has the boots-on-the-ground market knowledge you already have.

So who do you actually go after? Start with CPAs and wealth advisors. Their clients are the ones who just had the capital gains event, sold a business, sold stock, sold appreciated real estate, and are scrambling to find somewhere to park that gain before the tax bill hits. CPAs know who these people are before anybody else does, and they are your fastest way in. From there, look at local Opportunity Fund managers and sponsors, the ones actually raising and deploying this money, plus developers and builders doing infill or new construction in a qualifying tract. If you're in a rural market, get to know your local economic development office, because OZ 2.0 was built with you in mind.

Picture two guys with the exact same amount of cash. One of them calls an appraiser first and asks "is this a good bet." The other calls a lender first and finds out six months later he overpaid. Which one do you want to be working with?

Don't walk into these conversations pitching "I do appraisals." Pitch "I can tell you if this deal actually works before you put your gain into it." That's a different conversation, and it's the one that gets you into rooms most appraisers never see. Show up where the money already is, investment clubs, CPA continuing ed events, economic development meetings, and be the guy in the room who talks numbers, not the guy who fills out forms.

If you want to see which zones are near you, there's a map at opportunityzones.com/map. Fair warning, that's still the old map. The new OZ 2.0 zones haven't been drawn yet, governors don't start nominating tracts until this summer, and Treasury won't finalize anything until late 2026. So use it to see where things stand today, not where they'll end up.

This is your chance to get in front of the deal instead of showing up after it's already done. Start paying attention to the zones near you. Start talking to the CPAs and fund managers in your market. This is a wider lane than a standard appraisal, and it pays like it.

Point #1: The Plaud Recorder I use a Plaud recorder on my phone most days. It is a little voice recorder the size of a skinny wallet, and it records calls, meetings, and the half-formed ideas I say out loud in the truck. Every recording gets transcribed automatically and dropped into my system, where an AI reads it overnight and pulls out anything I promised somebody. I used to lose those promises constantly. I have not lost one since August. If you are an idea-in-the-car person like me, this is the cheapest fix I know of.

Point #2: UAD 3.6: The Video Game Yes, really. Go to game.dustinharrisos.com on your phone. You are the appraiser, you laser the corners and the porch height, you grab the photos, and the dog, the goat, the chickens, the homeowner and a Realtor fishing for a number all try to stop you before the clock runs out. It is free, it takes two minutes, and it was built in one evening by describing it to an AI, which is the real reason I am sending it to you. Send me your score.

At the end of September, Kami and I got on a plane to Europe for two weeks. Vienna, Salzburg, a few days in the Austrian Alps, then down to Italy and onto a ship that worked its way around the Adriatic and the Greek islands. And I did something I have only done a few times when leaving for that amount of time, I left the laptop at home. On purpose.

I want to be clear about how on purpose. I did not buy the wifi package on the boat. For most of every day I had no connection at all. At the ports I would get a signal for an hour or two, check in, answer what needed answering, and then the ship would pull out and I would be gone again. I still used AI the whole trip, but as the guy I ask questions, not the guy I build things with. The only thing I built in fourteen days was that silly video game in talked about above, and I built it sitting in the Rome airport, from my phone, because it was fun.

Here is what happened to the businesses while I was gone. Nothing. Orders came in and got scheduled. The appraisers inspected. Reports went out. Payroll ran. The goats got fed and the yoga sessions got paid out and the short-term rentals got cleaned and turned over and priced. My morning brief showed up every day with the weather where I was and the three things that actually needed me, and most days there were not three. I had spent the better part of two years building a business I could leave, and this was another time I actually tested it by leaving.

I am not going to turn this into a productivity lesson. I did not come home more efficient. I came home having stood on a mountain in Lofer and not thought about a single appraisal. That was worth doing for its own sake, and I would have told you so even if the business had wobbled while I was gone.

But it did not wobble, and I want you to sit with why. It was not luck. It was the systems I have been nagging you about in this newsletter for many years, the documentation and the delegation and the tools that do the heavy lifting while you do the thinking. Every one of those was annoying to build in the moment. Every one of them was the reason I could turn the phone off and watch the islands go by.

So here is my ask. Find a stretch of time, a week, a weekend, even a full day, and disconnect on purpose. Not a vacation where you work from a nicer chair. Actually gone. If the thought of it makes your stomach drop, that is not a reason to skip it. That is the information. It is telling you exactly which part of your business still cannot run without you, and that part is your next project.

You did not get into this profession to be chained to it. Build the thing that lets you leave, and then leave. The work will be there when you get back. It was for me.

Now, go create some value!