The Great Sorting Escape Plan
Where are you in the great sorting? If you don’t know what I'm referring to you'll need to listen to last week's episode where I laid out some of the ways people, and especially appraisers, are being sorted and squeezed into one of three categories: the bottom tier where price, speed, and low quality are the norm, the upper tier where you name your price, choose your clients, write your own ticket, and own a market, and dead. Those are the three categories.
You're either becoming the top dog, the bottom mutt, or you're leaving the business for greener pastures. The good news is that you get to choose and take some action which will determine where you end up, although I know most of you won't. Not because you’re not good people, but because you're comfortable and lazy. You've had it too good for too long and, although you see some changes happening at this moment, it's still not enough for you to make any significant changes.
For those of you who will take some action and make some changes, the world is your oyster, so to speak, because being really good in business is a fairly low bar, especially in the appraisal business. It’s so easy to be really good in this business that most people don’t even try.
In the last episode, we talked about what’s happening and why the appraisal world is being split into two groups; those who get chosen and those who get shopped; and the people who run a business and the people who wait for one to happen.
We talked about the operators versus the order takers, the generalists versus the specialists, the visible experts versus the invisible technicians, and so on.
Today is not theory or more explanations of what or why, today is about action because simply knowing the Great Sorting is happening will not protect you from it. Only action does.
And I want to be direct right out of the gate, even if it makes a few of you mad. If you listened to part one and your response was, 'yeah yeah, Blaine, I get it, that was interesting', but you didn't change anything last week, then you are already being sorted and probably not into the category that benefits you.
This episode is for the appraiser who is done being at the mercy of volume, fees, and other people’s decisions and wants to take control of their future.
The market could give two squats how many reports you completed last month, what your average fee was, and what your turn time was. Those numbers help you, they don’t help your customers one bit because they sort and choose based on what matters to them.
So, let’s talk about the new scoreboard, because this is what the market is rewarding right now. The market is rewarding visibility. It’s rewarding specialization. It’s rewarding the ability to articulate your value proposition and your sales ability. It’s rewarding speed and good communication. It’s rewarding defensible commentary and support for your conclusions. It’s rewarding tech enabled operators and operations. And it’s rewarding those with clear boundaries and clear policies. The market will almost always reward those who are very clear about who they are, who they serve, and what problems they solve.
Notice what is not on the scoreboard.
“Working really hard.”
“Being aloof.”
“Being difficult to communicate with.”
“Having a license.”
“Being busy.”
“Having done this for twenty years.”
"Having some fancy titles or letters after your name."
Experience matters, but only if you can translate that experience into value that the market understands and truly cares about. You can scream as loud and as often as you want about how smart, how experienced, and how important you are; but if that’s not what the market cares about, you’re chasing ghosts.
So, here’s the 90-day plan that should be simple, although not easy for most of you because most of you are too comfortable and too used to just complaining instead of taking real action. You’ve had it too good for too long, which might make this 90-day plan a little too much, but I’ll throw it out there for the motivated few who know that they will either change on their own or change will be forced upon them and I’ll express it in the form of what to do each week for the next 4 weeks. Then you just keep doing the 4-week plan over and over for at least 90 days.
Week 1: Pick your lane
Choose one non lender niche and commit to it for the next ninety days. I didn’t say focus only on non-lender work and drop your lender work. I said pick your lane. You don’t want to divorce appraisals? Fine, that’s not your lane. Pick estate and date of death appraisals instead. But pick one lane and commit to it for at least 90 days.
Will your life and business change forever? Maybe. Not likely, but it might. What will happen is you’ll learn some things, you’ll reduce some fear, you’ll start to get a sense that maybe this might just work, you’ll start to see you’re not handcuffed to low fee AMC work, and you’ll commit for another 90 days. But you have to pick a lane and commit for some reasonable period of time. I don’t really think 90 days is reasonable, but if I said commit to it for a year, you’d all be out, so just give it 90 days and then reassess.
Write a one sentence positioning statement so that you are clear about what you offer, who you serve, and what problem you solve better than anyone else. An example might be, “I help families get easy to understand retrospective valuations so that their loved ones can rest easy knowing their assets were protected.” Steal it if you wish.
The idea is to state clearly who you help, by doing what, and what the end result is for your clients. If you cannot say what you do in one sentence, the market cannot remember you. Little tip: all the shit you think is really important about what you do? Nobody cares! Stop trying to puff up up our chest with all they level 8, 9, and 10 appraisals speak and talk about stuff that matters to them.
Nobody believes you when you use meaningless words like ‘public trust’, ‘Comprehensive collateral risk stratification framework’,and ‘empirically derived adjustment matrices.’ All of which I pulled directly from some of your websites. None of that means one bit to homeowners, in fact, it means nothing to lenders and underwriters either. You write it because somebody told you that it matters or because you derive all of your self worth from making yourself feel superior and others feel small. Stop it! Talk like a normal human being that has a little bit of extra training and experience that might just help someone.
Week 2:Build your client experience checklist.
Sometimes I’ll refer to this as the customer and client journey. Look, I get it, you were born, raised, and built on box checking lender work where the client journey is simple: accept order, complete order, upload order, wait to get paid.
In the great sorting, that client journey will remain the same for the continuously declining low-end work. For the kind of work many of you seem to think doesn’t exist, higher end lender work, you most definitely need an experience checklist and a written-out client workflow, or you’ll treat the good lenders the same way you treat the low-end AMC work, which is part of the problem.
For every appraiser I see saying, ‘we don’t have any good lenders like that in my area’, all you’ve done as outed yourself as somebody who has never ventured out into your market and walked into a lender’s office. You’ve never spoken at a lenders office. You’ve never made yourself known in a positive way to the good lenders in your market. Stop lying to yourself and everyone else, we’ve been doing this way too long and I’ve traveled to too many parts of the world to buy the bullshit argument, “our market is different”. No, it’s not.
If you want to move into the upper tier where you get to choose your clients in the great sorting, you have to have a written plan that states every step in the process that makes you “easy to work with”, which is a competitive advantage in 2026. So many appraisers have intentionally and unintentionally made themselves difficult to work with that just being a friendly, helpful voice in the market is a massive strategic advantage.
By the way, I said many appraisers have made themselves ‘unintentionally’ difficult to work with because, quite often, it is unintentional, you just don’t know that you’re difficult to work with because you’ve never taken an honest, objective look at your business in this way and through the lens of the customer or client.
Imagine you were a potential customer or client instead of the owner. Don’t just ask ‘how easy am I to work with?’, that’s like asking yourself how smart you are. We’re often not very honest with ourselves when it comes to the difficult questions that may reveal answers we don’t want to hear. Most people see themselves with a skewed view because it’s simply how our brains work. We think we’re great and everyone else sucks. It’s why you’ll flip somebody off when they accidentally cut you off in traffic but get incensed when they flip you off for accidentally doing the same thing to them.
So, here are some ways that you potentially make yourself difficult to work with without even knowing it.
When you look, act, and sound like everyone else in the market, you’re viewed as interchangeable with everyone else, which makes it difficult to choose you over everyone else based on anything other than lowest price and quickest turn time. If you lead with credentials as opposed to solutions to problems they really have, you’re interchangeable with everyone else who has letters after their name.
If you can’t or won’t explain the process clearly and transparently, the customers have no real idea how to behave and who to choose.
When you overload customers with too much detail and industry speak, which makes them feel small and stupid, which makes you difficult to choose.
When you have no web presence, or a web presence that looks like it was built in 1997 and hasn’t been touched since (I’m talking to all of your XSite owners), you make it difficult to choose you over the more modern and updated ones.
If you provide little to no social proof like Google reviews, or even just regular visible public content, you’re difficult to work with.
If you don't have a script for people who are price shopping without fully understanding the whole process, you're confirming for them that price shopping was the exact right thing to do. Don't get upset when people price shop, especially when nobody has ever taught them that we're not all the same and all appraisals are not the same.
When you don't have a process for either answering every call, or at least responding almost immediately, you make it difficult to work with and choose you. We use some automations that automatically send a text whenever we miss a call, we call back almost immediately if we can't answer, and we have an autoresponder set up for emails, so they feel like we got back to them immediately with some questions for them. If you respond slowly at the start, you signal future slowness.
If your phone persona is unprofessional, not by your own standards, but by their standards, you’re going to be difficult to choose over someone who understands that their telephone voice and tone absolutely has to be different from their in-person voice and tone because, with a phone call, you’re tasked with conveying lots of context and meaning with only one of your tools: your voice.
Do you modulate your voice when you answer a call? Or do you insist that 'this is just how I speak?' Do you ask questions with no context, so they feel like they're being interrogated? Or do you have a script that makes them feel like they've made the right choice in reaching out to you?
Do you make it difficult for people to pay you? What's difficult? Cash or check only. If you don’t have a modern payment processor like PayPal, Stripe, Square, or Venmo, you’re difficult to work with. If you don’t like the fees those processors charge, build the fee into your price…simple.
Friends, you’re either easy to work with and to choose over everyone else or you aren’t. Until you step back and look at the process through the eyes and experience of the potential customer, you'll always execute it through the eyes and experience of an appraiser.
We started this part talking about your client experience checklist, so here’s what your checklist should include:
·Confirm appointment within X hours.
·Send intake email with what you need from them.
·Send status updates or, at bare minimum, update your portals and add a kind message every now and then on the lender deals.
·Don’t hesitate to say, ‘Thanks for the business!’, or ‘really appreciate you uploading the condo docs!’, inside of the portals. It’s likely just a loan processor you’re communicating with, and they don’t technically send you the business, but if you don’t think they carry some weight inside their offices, you’ve fallen prey to power of the internet to dehumanize the person on the other end of the keyboard.
·If it’s a non-lender client, make it easy to pay!
Then send the final report with a very nice message, an invitation to reach out with questions, a way for them for either leave you a 5-star review or to voice their concerns, and that’s it. This is the stuff that separates professionals from chaos merchants.
One of the reasons you may not have a robust non-lender business built yet is because you have not articulated to yourself what your value proposition is to them. You can’t wait until somebody calls you and asks what you can do for them and expect a great answer to come out of you if you haven’t taken the time to sell yourself first on what the client’s experience will be and why you might just be the best, lowest risk option even at a higher price. Build your client experience checklist and the language you’re going to use when someone reaches out to you.
Week 3: Build visibility
If you’re not findable, you’re not bankable. If I have to spend extra time trying to locate you in a world where I can find anything in seconds, my trust for you drops to almost zero. In 2026 and beyond, if you want to be successful as a service provider and purveyor of products, the most successful are also the most visible.
Record four short videos answering common questions in your lane. Keep them short and simple. Two to three minutes, one question per video. Some examples might be, ‘What does a divorce appraisal actually include’, ‘How is a prelisting appraisal different from a CMA’, ‘What makes an estate appraisal credible for IRS purposes’, and ‘How do appraisers handle properties with additional living areas.’
Create a YouTube channel and then upload them. From there, you post them on LinkedIn, Facebook, your website, your Google Business Profile, and anywhere else your potential clients, agents, and lenders might be scrolling. You do not need to be famous. The goal is to be findable, believable, and eventually recognized. By doing so, you may actually become a key person of influence in your market and area of expertise which gives you pricing power. Become visible!
Week 4: Build your pipeline
What’s a pipeline? It’s a simple recognition that sales happen before people actually pick up the phone to order or inquire about you, sometimes long before. Your pipeline is the list of assets and equity you’re building long before it ever gives you a dollar.
Make a list of 25 potential sources of business you’d like to be trading with, so to speak. If you chose divorce, it is attorneys, mediators, counselors, and real estate agents. If you chose estate work, it is estate planners, fiduciaries, attorneys, and real estate agents.
If you chose prelisting work, it will be primarily agents, brokers, and anyone who owns a home in your market that may be selling their home in the future.
You build a pipeline by reaching out with a simple message. Not a pitch, a professional introduction and something of value to them. You are starting a relationship that may take a while to develop, which is why it’s called a ‘pipeline’. They start at one end of the pipeline and, if you do a good job of adding value over a long period of time, your content moves them through the pipeline from stranger, to suspect, to prospect, to client or customer, eventually to raving fan of you and your business because of how amazing they were treated on the customer journey.
An example of an introduction on the non-lending side of things might be:
‘Hey John, my name is Blaine, and I have been specializing in divorce valuation work for the past 12 years. I’m putting together a short, practical education session for attorneys on how appraisal issues can make or break dissolution of marriage cases and how we help attorneys make more money in less time with our specialized service. If you feel this might be of some value to you and your team, I’d be happy to share it in twenty minutes over Zoom. If you and your team love tacos like we do, I’d be happy to come to your office and share the same information, tacos are on me!
That is it. You are offering value, not begging for business. After that, you send them something every few weeks that might be of value for them and a demonstration of your expertise in that specific area. You can send it via email or snail mail, both work. I prefer video since having them see your face and hear your expertise in your own voice is the most powerful way to become known and visible, but the more important
That’s it. Four weeks repeated three times for a 90-day plan doing some things you’ve probably never done or even thought about in that way. Anyone can do something for 90 days and, if you can’t, I hate to break this to you, but there is almost nothing that will help you. This it true for almost anything and everything in your life. If you can’t commit to doing something or changing something in your life or business for 90 days, you will always default back to old, broken habits and systems.
In fact, to go a bit further and add a little more value for you in this episode, I’ll say it this way: every 90 days of your life from this moment on should be experiments. Every 90 days should be you or you and your team trying different things as experiments to learn what works and what doesn’t, or what works really well and what works only moderately well.
If you’re 30 years old today and you live to be 80, that means you’ll have 200 more 90-day opportunities to test and try different things in your life and business. Every 90 days is an opportunity to test something new. It doesn’t have to be a ‘big’ something, it can be something small, like cutting out soda from your diet, trying out a different way to say things when someone calls you for business, or maybe doing something different in a relationship to make it better. The point of testing things is simply to be conscious of what you’re doing and then track the results.
Let’s wrap up this episode with a few questions. Don’t just answer these in your head with the version of yourself you want to be. Answer with the truth.
If your top two clients disappeared, how long would you last?
Can you explain your value in twenty seconds without sounding like a form filler?
Are you known for a specific lane or are you just available and competing against every other appraiser, Realtor, or Lender doing the same thing?
Do you have systems and processes or do your clients run your schedule?
Are you building a real brand that is differentiated from everyone else or are you simply hiding behind your license?
If any of those questions hit you in the gut, good, that’s where growth lives and that’s where the seeds of a new 90-day experiments can begin.
Friends, The Great Sorting is not coming, it is already here. It’s been happening for a while, and it is sorting people based on who owns their business and who is just being carried by the market. It’s sorting based on the operators and the order takers, the visible experts and the invisibility technicians, the generalists and the specialists, the tach adopters and the tech avoiders, and those who can display real leadership and set boundaries versus those who can’t kick the habit of people pleasing.
The Great Sorting is like gravity in that it doesn’t matter nor care whether you believe it exists or not, all are affected by it and subject to its rules. We’re all being sorted in some way, the decision is up to you whether or not you get squeezed into the upper echelons of life and business or related to the busiest, nosiest, and more crowded playing field at the bottom.
Until next time, I’m out…
