Finance
The Next Job Humans Lose to Robots: Real Estate Appraiser
Advances in big data at Zillow and elsewhere are helping automation creep into knowledge-based professions.
This article is for subscribers only.
Twenty-five years ago, Brian Weaver was told at a seminar that the real estate appraisal profession would be killed off by technology in five years. It didn’t happen. But he now thinks the forecast wasn’t exactly wrong—just early.
Weaver today works at the appraisal licensing board in Illinois. Appraisers size up the value of a home before a lender gives the buyer a mortgage. He says a reckoning has arrived for the industry, which employs about 73,000 mostly college-educated people in the U.S. “The future for appraisers specializing in residential mortgage work is coming to an end,” he wrote in a recent newsletter for peers. “No bang. Not even a whimper.”