A brief overview of my slide deck from a recent presentation given at the AIC BC Fall educational webinar November 26, 2025
Feel free to scroll the slides below, but I have a couple of key points I’d like to make. I will continue to build on the concept of community. I talk a lot about George Dell and our growing community. Why? I hope it’s clear to most appraisers, and many other professionals, that working in isolation isn’t sustainable in the long run. We will do better, and grow faster, when we’re connected and lifting the profession as a whole.
Before we get into all the nitty-gritty, let’s have some fun. The day before my presentation, I found myself scrambling to implement an update to an appraisal tool built using AI that I was planning to present. Part of my struggle was that my five-year-old “powerhouse” laptop was being pushed to its limit by the numerous projects I had on the go. I found myself wandering down the rabbit hole of computer shopping. With so many options and tech features, I’ve always found that a bit of a mind bending adventure. I’ve never been in a position to drop several thousand on a laptop, I do a lot of mobile work and like having that flexibility, so I’m always looking for the best deals while trying to balance the minimum specs.
Here is a link to a hosted version of the playground Laptop Shopping app just in time for Black Friday shopping
https://better-appraisal-laptop-lab.streamlit.app
And the GitHub where I made it an opensource free app that you can paly around with editing if you like.
https://github.com/PaulERayburn/better-appraisal-laptop-lab
If you are interested in learning more about the process of getting setup and building apps you could check out another series of my videos. There are links to additional sources for better guides on getting set up as well.
I searched the min specs on BestBuy and the sorted price low to high. The Canuck best buy site (I now know) uses a different tech than the US and many other sites, but it has the show more feature each click ads another 10 or so and before you know it I’m getting up near my 2k max budget and starting to see some pretty good specs, but now I have a list of almost a couple hundred and a lot of crud mixed in.
It struck me I could probably consult my AI tech bros. I think I happened to have just installed Gemini 3 and I was like, hey, Gem3 do you think you could scan an image of a couple hundred listings and pic out the best deals. Of course Mr. optimistic says 100% lay it on me. So sure enough I used my scrolling scanner and gave it a massive like 1080 x 20000 mp image.
Ultimately what was more efficient was that, as mentioned the BestBuy Canada site those nearly 200 listings could be saved as a simple HTML and with just a couple more prompts I had a functional tool that weighted and provided context based on my current specs that I had suggested as a “feature”. So that became the subject of the second half of my presentation. I decided to spend a bit more time after and publish this as a streamlit.io app open sourced on GitHub and I added a Google shopping API because the US BestBuy Sites seemed to be to complicated for the parsing tools. Maybe with a bit more effort I could have found the right package to make that happen.
Here is the laptop shopping app video preview
The entire mission of the app I was hoping to present and this “laptop Shopping” app was to share the code and help other appraisers and others who were interested in collaborating on some projects , chance to test the waters. This is incredibly breaking tech. Within the past several weeks the power of the AI models like Chat GPT Codex 5.1 ClaudeCode Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 3.0 and just early this week Claude Opus 4.5 all of which are breaking new ground. These are not overhyped. The tech has the ability write code and develop software at a level that matches many senior level programmers. Of course their are nuances to that and while it is likely taking some significant amount of work, many pros are finding it simply frees up time to do higher level tasks and for many, simply improve their quality of life. In so many ways it is a complex evolution, but not one that I think can be simply ignored.
Are you getting sick of hearing about AI yet? Well, get used to it. My prediction it is never going away so long as we have lights to turn on.
Here is a full list of links with essentially everything you would need to get started building apps using an AI Agent/ Assistant.
Includes links to the various applications used in my presentation on building apps using AI Coding agents.
First Homework Assignment
*If you are on Mac you may need to modify some of the steps, but there is a ton of resources, and I know Mac users are equally well represented.
1.) Get setup with your preferred coding agent. I recommend ClaudeCode and use the models either Sonnet 4.5 or Opus 4.5. I have found good success with direct CLI using Windows Powershell(Note you will be directed to ensure you have node.js installed and current if asked to use Chocolaty you are likely better off not using that so skip that option when offered. It will work but I and some other users have found that it sometimes installs out of date versions).
If you like more of a GUI experience, I have had good success with Open AI’s Codex via IDE’s such as Visual Studio. Positron is a solid option, but its just out of beta and I found it very resource heavy and maybe a bit overkill for beginners. I haven’t tried Cursor.com but they have some promising “One stop shopping”.
2.) Setup GitHub Desktop and create your own repository on GitHub.com
Find the better-appraisal-laptop-lab create a branch, ask your agent to look at the TODO list and see if you can get the agent to assist you to nock something off the To Do list or add some other feature you think would improve it for your own or other use. Or you could do something like ask it to provide common Ram classes Like 32GB, 64GB, etc as right now it requires a manual type in which would be a small UI improvement.
3.) Test the other features of the app or be very clear to the agent to ensure the edits you are making will not affect other functioning components.4.) Once you have done that and feel you have tested the app, you can make a pull request. That will notify the other users and developers that there is a new feature or bug fixes etc, so it can be reviewed and pulled into the main or remain as a branch until it makes sense to merge it.
On the following slide I have provided all of the necessary links and basic information for you to build your own applications or contribute as a team. Whether for our community or maybe your own, or your company. I do hope that a few of you will embrace this concept and get involved and help lift the profession for everyone. If you find this is something you would like to contribute to please let me know and I would be happy to share some of the other exciting projects that we have on the go.
Keep in mind I built this demo laptop shopping app in an afternoon and subsequently made a few updates and not from a template. The point is that I cannot write a line of code that could add 2 + 2. The ability to interact with these tools is a major game changer. There will always be a need for the foreseeable future for complex issues and very advanced applications, but a lot can be done to get apps to fully functional stages and get your ideas into a functional state which may or may not require involving an expert to help make some critical adjustments. And this breakthrough really has come in just the past few weeks and months. This is a leading edge wholesale change of how software and applications will come to life for the foreseeable future.
Please feel free to contact me for assistance or any questions you may have.
Thank You
Paul Rayburnpaul@aclearappraisal.ca Cel 778-760-3360
So we have a double entendre coming up later in this post and this double edge sword. On the one hand this tech is currently a bit of a savior to another project I’m working on that nearly crash landed, but now has new wings. On the other I know the stats are coming out and some of the fears we had with AI taking jobs is happening, not to mention just some of the social, humanity crisis that appears inevitable. The digital arts is quickly becoming just flash in the pan of humanity and its probably not long before that moves into the more physical.
In a recent conversation I heard word from a recently minted AIC member that their AMC “rep” told them that fees above $150 to $200 would result in them not attaining sufficient work to survive”. That is for full appraisals. That is the results of an effective oligopsony. That was a direct quote that was whispered to me 10 years ago. The exact same fee range. The results of that for me lead to half a decade of rushed and, quite frankly often, reports that I never felt good about. Were they compliant? maybe, if this same narrative had lowered the standard of care and workmanship of the entire profession to a similar level then according to applicable appraisal standards, they probably were.
The backbone or the Achilles heel of many professions is the written standards, and effectively both USPAP and CUSPAP apply “The reasonable professional test”. Often described as “what would their peers have done”. Based on the high standards of the AIC and similarly CNAREA, for education, and the cost of ongoing insurance, data access, and technology costs, the rates required to support these costs is significant. The result is either, do not do lender/ AMC work or rush the work.
There is more to the story. This is trickle down economics. The lenders also threaten the AMCs that if they raise their fees they might “shift” their business. Sounds like a familiar threat? Now, keep in mind Canadian lenders are among the most profitable and stable lenders in the world. That is a double entendre. Okay, maybe not the best use of the phrase, but lets just say it’s gross profit.
This has also lead to the obsolescence of appraisal technology. As these downward pressures have stifled fees and quality of work, they have extracted resources from going into improving technology that would assist appraisers with doing better quality analysis and reporting. There has been no meaningful improvements in such software for nearly a decade and all of Canada’s major lenders via their AMCs mandate specific software, most of which require manual data entry with limited integrations to numerous available data sources. That is productivity and improved work quality left on the table.
There have been some recent updates, but there was no effort whatsoever to help appraisers integrate more advanced technologies into the process. It was generally, here is the new software, learn how to do your manual data entry on this new form. If there was other intentions those were not conveyed. Some forms have changed and more likely to improve access to extract the appraiser intellectual property, and other valuable data for the purpose of developing valuation alternatives.
The following are copies of the slides shared in my presentation for the AIC BC Educational webinar day.
November 26, 2025
