How do you confirm a comp?  After talking to thousands of appraisal firms, yes thousands, we have determined how most appraisers go about comp write-ups.  Depending on the assignment and location of the subject property, appraisers generally aggregate five to ten comparables (for example) the Sales Comparison Approach for a single report.  The sales research criteria are applicability of property type, physical characteristic similarities and timely data.  They sift through the data and take out the obvious non-arm's length sales, such as related buyers and sellers.  Most appraisers will then call and confirm each sale and manually write on their printed out draft comps.  After they have confirmed all of the sales, they then manually type them into DataComp.

 

Other appraisers will create draft comps and immediately type them into DataComp and confirm them as they enter data.  Another method is to create an import filter in DataComp and import some raw data from public or private data sources in order to avoid typing in common data fields such as buyer, seller, sale price, sale date, etc. for each comp.

For those multi-tasking appraisers, they often have two or possibly three monitors with ten or more websites open at any given time.  This group seems to be the most efficient "comp writer-uppers".  They use sites like anwho.com to get to confirming sources phone number, superpages.com for a tenant list within a particular building, property appraiser's website for base physical data, and state corporation lookup web site to determine the buyer and seller's names (if purchased as a corporation or LLC).  Some use Dragon Naturally Speaking voice recognition software and dictate their comps (primarily the remarks section) into DataComp.

Often times these appraisers will Google the comparable's address.  Sometimes the appraisers get lucky and finds the comp was a former Loopnet listing or maybe finds an article written up about the transaction in a local trade journal or newspaper.  They make good use of Loopnet's "recent sales" section of their web site which can be very helpful in researching sales.  They also do not overlook smaller lesser obvious research sources such as MLS or a property appraiser's sales search.

In the end there are many ways to confirm comps.  The goal is efficient use of time to produce the highest quality comp.  Have a quick meeting in your office and share efficiency tips about comp write-ups.  After all, I bet the majority of your every day work time has something to do with comp write-ups.