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Hey team. This is the last full month before Sedona, and I want to make sure nobody on the All-Star team misses it by accident. The Elevate Appraiser Retreat is November 9 through 11, and Blaine, Roy, and I have built this one around a single word: BECOME.  Last year we spent our time on WHY you do this. This year we are going after who you are turning into. If you have been telling yourself you will go to one of these someday, someday is about three weeks out.

One more thing before you dive in. I put together two UAD 3.6 checklists, one for the field and one for the desk, and I have been giving the field checklist away in the appraiser groups. But both of them are yours as an AST member. Print the field one, put it on your clipboard, and take it to your next inspection. It walks the property in the order you actually walk it and it catches the new data points that will otherwise send you back for a second trip.

November 2 is coming. Let's spend this month getting ready instead of getting nervous.

I want to talk about money this month, because I think a lot of you are about to give yourselves a pay cut without realizing you did it.

Here is the situation. On November 2, UAD 3.6 becomes mandatory for new submissions to the UCDP. You know that. What I am not sure everybody has done is the arithmetic on what it does to your day.

The industry estimates I keep seeing put the learning curve at somewhere between 25 and 50 percent more time per report for the first several months. So take a report that runs you six hours today, inspection through delivery. That same report is going to run you seven and a half to nine hours in November. Not because you got worse at your job. Because you are collecting room-level detail you never had to collect before, and you are typing discrete data into fields where you used to write a paragraph.

Now here is the part that should bother you. There was a survey that went out to about 900 appraisers this year, and 52 percent said they expect fees to go up.

Expect.

THIS INCLUDES ALL THE BENEFITS IN THE ALL STAR TEAM!

I have been coaching long enough to know exactly what that word means. It means they are hoping somebody else does it first. Nobody is going to hand you a raise because the GSEs changed the data standard. AMCs are not going to call you up in October and say listen, we ran the numbers and we think you deserve more. That call does not come. It has never come.

So let's be clear about what happens if you do nothing. You work three more hours per file for the same check. On a fifty-file month, that is a hundred and fifty hours you donated. That is nearly four full work weeks. Not a fee compression problem. Not an AMC problem. A you-did-not-ask problem.

I am not telling you to be unreasonable. I am telling you to price the work you are actually doing. The scope changed. The scope genuinely, materially changed, in writing, with a federal implementation date attached to it. This is the most defensible fee conversation any of us has had in a decade, and it expires the moment 3.6 becomes normal. Right now it is new and everybody knows it is new. Six months from now it is just how appraising works and nobody will raise an eyebrow at your quote.

So here is what I would do, and I would do it in October, not November.

Subject to Engineer Cert?

Start with your own number. Go pull your last twenty files and figure out what you actually made per hour on them. Not per report. Per hour. Most appraisers have never run this and it is uncomfortable the first time. Then take that number and apply a 25 percent time increase to it and look at what your effective rate becomes. That figure is your argument, and it is not an opinion. It is your own data.

Then tell people. Not everyone at once. Start with your best non-lender clients, the attorneys and the private work, because those are the relationships where you can have an adult conversation about scope. Say it plainly. The reporting standard changed on November 2, the report requires substantially more data collection and analysis, and my fee is adjusting to reflect the additional time. Effective date, new number, thank you for the work. That is the whole script. You do not need to apologize and you do not need to over-explain.

For AMC work, update your fee schedule now and send it now, before the deadline, while the change is still news. Some of them will push back. Some of them will quietly pay it. And a couple of them will tell you no, which is information you needed anyway, because a client who will not pay you for documented additional scope was never going to be your best client.

Understand what I am really asking. I am not asking you to squeeze anybody. I am asking you to stop being the only party in this transaction who absorbs a cost increase silently. The software companies are raising their prices. Your E and O is not getting cheaper. Everybody in this supply chain is adjusting to 3.6 except the person doing the actual work.

I'm also not encouraging any type of collusion. Notice I did not give any specific fee or any specific floor. I'm asking you to value your time and individually choose what you're going to charge. 

You are the appraiser. You are the one who has to be at the property, capture the data, defend the analysis, and sign it. Price accordingly.

And if you have been sitting on a fee increase for two or three years because you could never find the right moment, I have good news. The moment found you. It has a date on it.

Now let me give you the other half of that strategy, because there is a category of work that November 2 does not touch at all.

Non-lender work does not go through the UCDP. Estate and date-of-death appraisals, divorce work, tax appeals, litigation support, partnership dissolutions, pre-listing opinions for private sellers. None of that gets submitted to Fannie or Freddie. No URAR. No UAD. No 3.6. You write the report in the format the assignment actually calls for.

Think about what that means for the next six months. While the lender side of this profession is fighting software crashes and revision requests and workflows that feel backwards, the private side is going to run exactly the way it ran in October. Same forms, same process, same turn times, and generally better fees with a client who talks to you like a professional instead of a portal.

I am not telling you to abandon lender work. I am telling you that a business with a private-work pipeline is about to have a very different November than a business without one, and October is your last clean month to build one.

THIS INCLUDES ALL THE BENEFITS FROM THE LOWER TIERS!

So who do you call? Estate planning attorneys are the first stop, because their work never stops and it never depends on interest rates. Somebody dies, the estate needs a value as of the date of death, and that value needs to hold up to the IRS. Family law attorneys are next. Every contested divorce with a house in it needs a number that survives a hearing. Then CPAs, who run into date-of-death and gift valuations constantly and usually have nobody good to refer to.

Here is the part most appraisers get wrong. Do not call these people and ask for work. Call them and offer to solve a problem. Attorneys are not sitting around wondering whether to hire an appraiser. They are wondering who is going to give them a report that does not fall apart under cross examination and does not make them look bad in front of a judge.

So lead with that. Tell them you do date-of-death and litigation work, that your reports are written to be defended, and that you are available for a conversation about what makes a valuation hold up in their world. Offer to be a resource before you ever ask to be a vendor. A one-page explainer on how a retrospective date-of-death appraisal actually works, dropped off at three law offices, will do more for you than a hundred cold emails.

You need six to eight of those relationships. Not sixty. Six to eight attorneys and CPAs who think of you first is a meaningful piece of your year, and it is completely insulated from everything happening on the lender side right now.

Make the calls this month.

Point #1: Atomic Habits, by James Clear I am finishing this one right now, and it is going to show up at Elevate, so consider this your head start. The core idea is that you do not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. Every single one of us has said we want to grow the business, get out of the field more, be home for dinner. Clear's argument is that the goal was never the problem. Read it before Sedona and you will get a lot more out of the room.

Point #2: The GSE Photo and Image Requirements Job Aid Fannie and Freddie put out a free job aid that lays out exactly which photos are required, which are conditionally required, and which are optional under 3.6, broken out by report section. It is the single cleanest answer I have found to "wait, do I need a picture of that?" Download it, keep it on your phone, and stop guessing at the property. It is at sf.freddiemac.com, and searching "UAD photo and image job aid" will land you right on the PDF.

I want to tell you what I did in September.

Every year, my boys and I go into the Idaho wilderness for the better part of ten days. Same spot, every time. We set up camp and we stay. We climb hills. We hike. We watch wildlife. We sit around a fire at night in some of the most beautiful country you will ever see in your life, and there is essentially no technology out there at all. No signal. No email. No portal. Nobody needs a revision by Thursday.

It is a family tradition, and it is one of the great joys of my life.

I am telling you this in an issue that has been about deadlines and fee letters and November 2, and I know that is a strange turn. But it is the honest one. Because I came out of those ten days clearer about my business than any planning session has ever made me. Not because I was thinking about work. I was not thinking about work at all. That was the whole point.

Here is what I have learned about this profession over thirty years. It will take everything you are willing to give it. The orders will always be there. There is always one more file, one more revision, one more thing that feels urgent enough to skip the trip. And if you let it, this job will quietly consume the years you were supposed to spend with the people you are doing it for.

My boys are not going to be boys much longer. That is the truth of it. Those days in the mountains are a finite number and I know exactly what they are worth.

So here is my ask, and it has nothing to do with UAD 3.6. Find your version of it. It does not have to be the wilderness. It does not have to be ten days. It might be a weekend, a stretch of coast, a cabin, a road trip with somebody you love. But find the thing that pulls you completely out of the work, put it on the calendar for next year right now, and then actually go.

Build the business that lets you do that. That is what all of this is for. The fees, the systems, the AI, the team. Not so you can work more efficiently forever. So you can leave.

November 2 is coming and we are going to handle it. We always do. But do not let a deadline convince you that this is the year you skip the thing that matters.

Now, go create some value!