$70 a visit for property data collection. Does that lead anywhere?

$70 with a 30 mile radius isn't a job, it's a sample. Do twenty of them, keep a log of actual door to door minutes including upload and the one house with three dogs, then decide. My guess is your real number lands near $28 an hour and the value of the twenty is entirely in knowing whether you want to be in strangers' basements for a living.

The measuring skill transfers further than people think. Sketching to a standard, knowing what counts as finished square footage below grade, seeing what condition ratings look like in the flesh. That's useful in inspection work, in tax appeal prep, in listing prep. So even if the visits don't count as license hours, they aren't nothing.

rigging, I've hired a data collector twice on files where the lender allowed it, and I'd take the gig for a season and no longer. What killed it as a career for the guy I used was that his volume depended entirely on one AMC's flow. When their orders dried up for six weeks he had zero pipeline of his own, because he'd never had a client, he'd had a queue. If you take it, spend the year building something that's yours in parallel.

On the license question, don't take anyone's word including mine, but when I called my state board the answer was that experience hours have to be under a supervisory appraiser with a written arrangement and the trainee's name on the report. Data collection for a hybrid does not put your name on anything. Different states word it differently, so ask yours directly and get the answer in writing. I'd still do the visits if the alternative is deciding blind, I just wouldn't count them toward anything.