Contributory Value with Mark “Skap” Skapinetz

In this episode I welcome Isaac Peck of Orep insurance and Working RE magazine. We discuss some of the narrative of Bias and Racism in the appraisal profession as well as some other topics.     

Isaac Peck is the President and Senior Broker at OREP and the Publisher of Working RE and Working PI magazines. His passion is providing service professionals and small business owners with unrivaled professional support, risk management, and liability insurance that meets their unique business needs. Isaac brings over 10 years of experience leading teams in Professional Liability insurance underwriting, operations, technology, and marketing–with a focus on E&O and general liability insurance for professionals. He is a Certified Microsoft Technology Associate, and holds a Master’s Degree in Accounting. 

Isaac not only serves as President and Senior Broker, he also writes numerous articles for Working Re magazine.  

Specializing in E&O and General Liability Insurance for over 20 Years. OREP is the home for Insurance, Business Support, and Risk Management for Professional Service Firms. Orep insures over 10,000 professionals including myself.   

In this episode, Mark brings on Matt LaMarsh, an Atlanta Real Estate Agent who continues to improve in his profession as well as life and more.  

While both have developed a good friendship together as well as a working relationship, none of this would have happened if they didn’t cross paths on the audio app Clubhouse.   It was there that a good bond was made because Matt as well as Mark had open minds about learning each others side of things.   

Agents and Appraisers somehow have a distinct lack of knowledge on what each offers in the process and the challenges they each face.   Through the clubhouse app, each were able to connect and form a bond, a bond of wanting to learn more about not only each other but what each side does.   

Matt is a wealth of knowledge, always striving to be better, but most of all how he continues to offer his knowledge, his time, his resources, but most of all himself to others out there.   

Have a listen to what inspired Matt, his journey and how he is becoming one of the top agents in the Atlanta Area.   

In this episode, we caught up with appraiser and author Jeremy Bagott. 

We expected to encounter a hard-edged industry reformer who would take us deep into some weed bed we didn’t want to be in. But by the end of the interview, we had the feeling that Bagott, to the extent anyone can truly know these things, was a regular guy. (This is true. I am a “regular guy.”)

His 2020 book, “Dispatches from the Cosmic Cobra Breeding Farm,” sounded a clarion call – a throwdown if you will. He exhorts appraisers to be like activist shareholders who own stock in a company that is found to be squandering precious capital on golden handshakes and corporate perks. 

He paints the Appraisal Foundation and its tiny government patron, the Appraisal Subcommittee, as a decades-old meal ticket for a couple dozen bon-vivants who have created a lucrative fiefdom. He asks appraisers to see the Appraisal Foundation, a tiny 501(c)(3) nonprofit, as a Disney-like rights-management operation that has attached itself, along with its growing number of copyrighted products, to an entire profession. The organism then plows back some of its time and money into gaining further influence and further cementing its standing. 

Bagott was getting back to work reviewing reports for a pipeline easement project when we caught up with him at his office in Ventura, California, a short drive from where he grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which he describes as “Levittown West.” As a kid, he daydreamed about being a game warden in Wyoming or piloting the Goodyear Blimp. As a teen, he had what he described as “problems adjusting,” got into trouble with the police and ended up joining the Marines.

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