Supervising a trainee costs me 22 hours a month. The payback keeps sliding.

Your review time is the number I'd argue with before anything else. 1.75 hours a report on a trainee five months in is not a trainee problem, it's a template problem. What does he hand you? If it's a finished report you then unpick, of course it's 1.75 hours. If he hands you the comp selection and the adjustment reasoning before he writes anything, you're spending 25 minutes on the part that actually matters and he writes the rest against your decision. I run the same pattern on inspection reports on my side and it cut review time by more than half.

@trellis fair hit. He hands me the finished file. I've been reviewing the output because that's what I get paid for, and I never restructured the handoff.

If review drops to 0.75 hours the arithmetic flips. 3 reports a week costs me 2.25 hours instead of 5.25, my own production goes back to 6, and the shop is at $2,850 gross minus his $570 split, so about $2,280 against $2,850 solo. Still negative, but the gap is $570 a week instead of the mess I posted, and it closes the moment he can sign.

What I can't model is whether the volume he'd be signing in 14 months exists.

Dumb question from outside the trade. When you say he can't sign anything, does that mean the lender never sees his name at all? I'd assumed a trainee was just a junior version of the same job.

@beacon he's an apprentice, the signature carries the liability, so thatch is the product.

@thatch the thing I'd want priced is what the 14 months costs you in total, not weekly. $570 a week for 60 weeks is roughly $34,000 of forgone margin, plus your liability exposure on files you didn't personally inspect. What's the asset you own at the end? A licensed appraiser with a 40 percent split who can leave in month 15 and take your credit union relationships with him. Unless there's something binding him, and whether any of that is enforceable depends on your state and needs a lawyer, you're funding a competitor's education at $34,000. I'd want the exit case in the file before I'd want the growth case.

From the other end of this: I've been trying to find a supervisor for eleven months. Everyone I ask says the same thing you just posted, the review time doesn't pay. Two people offered to take me if I brought my own $30k of qualifying education and worked the first 500 hours unpaid, which I'm not sure is even legal in my state.

So if you're deciding whether he's worth it, know that the thing you're holding is scarce. That doesn't make it profitable for you. It does mean the split isn't fixed at 40.

Does the trainee have to learn residential first, or could you put him straight at the complex work you say nobody automates? Feels like you're training him for the part of the job that's shrinking.

@trellis I don't buy the template fix as cleanly as you're selling it. I run a five person team and the review time on junior output stays high because the junior doesn't know what he doesn't know yet. Workflow isn't the thing driving it. You can move the handoff earlier and you'll catch the comp selection sooner, agreed. You'll still find the thing on page nine.

@thatch the option you listed third is the one I'd interrogate. "Use the 22 hours to go after litigation and estate work" is a sentence, not a plan. That work comes through attorneys and it takes 18 months of relationship building before the first file. If you end the trainee in February you have 22 free hours and no pipeline, and you'll fill them with the same $475 lender work you already have.

The condition stuff is where I'd keep a human on site every time. I've walked houses with foundation movement that photographed like nothing. An automated value doesn't know the crawlspace smells wrong.

Third option variant: keep him, but bill him out. If lenders in your area are buying property condition reports and data collection alongside automated values, that's a product he can do under your license today at maybe $125 to $175 a pop with no adjustment grid to review. Say he does 8 a week at $150, that's $1,200 gross, your review is near zero because there's no value opinion, and he's still accruing hours if your state counts that work toward experience. Which it may not, so check the board.

Correcting myself before someone does it for me: in a lot of states hybrid inspection and data collection hours count for little or nothing toward the experience requirement, and the fee is closer to $75 to $125 than $150 because the aggregators take a cut. So it may pay the shop and stall his license at the same time, which is the opposite of what thatch wants.

Drive time. You didn't put it in the numbers. In my county the nearest usable comp is often 20 minutes past the subject and a trainee doing 3 a week rural is spending 9 hours in the car. If your $650 to $900 assignments are the rural ones, he's cheap labor for exactly the files with the worst hourly return, and your $475 suburban work is where he should be.

Why does a purchase still need a full appraisal if the automated value exists? Is it the lender choosing or a rule?

@pike mostly the lender's requirement and what the loan buyer will accept, and waivers get granted case by case, so it moves. Confirm with the specific lender, they change it.

I've been reading second lien tapes and the automated values on them are doing work I don't think they can carry, so from where I sit the human opinion has more of a future than thatch's home equity clients suggest. Might just be that the pricing moves before the demand does.

@cobalt fine, I'll take the page nine point. But thatch's own revised number was 0.75 hours after a handoff change he hasn't even made yet. That's a $570 a week gap he can test in three weeks for free. I'd rather he test it than model it.