A few thoughts …
The real estate industry has enjoyed a boom for the last few years. That boom is now winding down, at least on a national scale. Two years from now could easily be a full-blown recession in RE, with few sales, lots of stuff sitting on the market, and lots of recent buyers upside down while watching their ARMs’ rates climbing at each adjustment.
Meanwhile, there’ll be a glut of everything RE related. Too many sales agents, too many brokers, too many broker offices, too many title co’s, too many refi storefronts, too many internet mortgage brokers, too many inspectors, too many fixer-upper handymen. And oh yeah, too many appraisers.
That’s a real lousy time to be trying to break into a new industry.
One of the side effects of a long boom in any industry is that maybe 50-60% of the people in the industry today have NEVER experienced anything else. Boom is their idea of normal. They collectively have no clue what to expect in a non-boom or how hard it can become in a genuine downturn. Their clueless optimism infects every decision they make, including the one to try to add additional appraiser help starting in 2008.
The RE industry is a funny combination of totally local and utterly national.
If you’re in the right area, the hurricane-free sunbelt maybe, then you might be experiencing zero or even mild growth while, say, suburban Philadelpia’s market is dead, dead, dead. Conversely, interest rates are set nationally, or nearly so. People don’t buy a house based on sticker price, rather on monthly payment. They talk about the sticker price, but that’s not what’s really going on.
When fixed-rate mortgages are at 10% a LOT of poeple will suddenly find their maximum affordable monthly payment buys a LOT less house than they’d gotten used to thinking they could buy. We’ve already played most of the games with negative am, longer am+balloon, etc. There’s not too much more room for creative financing to hide the fundamental disconnect between Joe & Jane Average’s income and their desire to live in a $200K house when the underlying commercial cost of capital becomes 7%.
On a more positive note:
2500 hours in 24 months is about 20 hours a week. People have worked two jobs, or done job + school, at that level of effort for 2 years before. Can you do the appraisal thing and also keep your present job, or keep most of it by going to 3/4 time? What about appraisal trainee + some other part-time compatible job? I question your assumption that you must work the trainee job exclusively with no other income.
As to benefits, bosh. You can buy insurance about as readily as the small company you work for now. The only challenge is in understanding the true size of your current wage. If you’re now making $30K/yr + medical, it’s really just the same as $36K/yr + no medical. So $36K is the number you compare to any no-benefit job.
Does the appraisal company you’d be working for offer bennies after you’ve finished apprenticeship? If not, don’t forget to include that difference in your calculations.
That all really depends on the market though. They mentioned that they have been overwhelmed with work for years and foresee having as much as work as they want in the future.