Property Data Analyst

Local real estate appraisal team hiring a Property Data Analyst. This position is in our Knoxville office five days a week. We aren't considering hybrid or remote arrangements for this role.

We're a residential appraisal firm and we're expanding. Every appraisal we produce depends on getting the physical facts of listed and sold properties right, and those facts are harder to pin down than most people expect. That's the job.

You'll be looking at public records, MLS listings, and other sources where the data is often wrong or missing. Your job is to figure out what's actually true by comparing the listing photos, the county tax records, and the MLS entry, and then make the call on things like where the rooms are and how much of the basement counts as finished square footage, so that our database ends up holding accurate property records. There's other appraisal data entry work that goes along with it, but that's the core of it.

The records will contradict each other regularly. You'll be making these calls dozens of times a day, and you need to be right the large majority of the time without stopping to agonize over each one, while flagging the entries that are genuinely in question so a reviewer can take a second look. People who need to feel certain before they'll commit to an answer won't be a good fit.

Pace is the part some can underestimate. Every report we produce needs three to five comparable properties researched, and the target is at least seven reports a day once you're up to speed. That's thirty to forty properties in a shift with other responsibilities mixed in around them. You're pulling the photos, opening the tax card, reading the MLS entry, reconciling three sources that disagree with each other, and making the calls. The person doing this work now finishes a full file in about thirty to forty five minutes and doesn't rush the judgment to get there. This is not a job where you can work slowly and carefully and make up for it with quality. You need to be fast at the keyboard and fast at deciding, and both are non-negotiable. We test typing speed during the hiring process and expect at least 60 words per minute to start. If you're a hunt and peck typist, or if your instinct when something is unclear is to slow down and study it, you'll be fighting this job.

Here's the other side of it. You won't be figuring this out alone. The person doing this work now is very good at it and she'll be the one training you, and she's glad to do it. We'll teach you our standards and the rules we follow, and nobody expects you to be at full speed for a while. What we can't teach is the willingness to decide, which is why the paragraph above reads the way it does.

What we're looking for

At least 60 words per minute typing with good accuracy. We verify it during the hiring process.
Comfort working across three monitors and several browser tabs, moving between sources and holding the comparison in your head.
Solid Windows file navigation, email, web research, and downloading and uploading files. Familiar with spreadsheet and word processing programs, or able to pick them up quickly.
The ability to read a set of rules once, ask a couple of good questions, and then apply them without being walked through every case.
Familiarity with real estate concepts and especially our local MLS is a real plus but isn't required. Background in title work, claims, mortgage processing, or paralegal work translates well also, but none of this is required.

Pay and terms

$22 to $25 an hour to start depending on experience. Full time, forty hours a week, W-2 employee and not a contractor. At ninety days we look at accuracy and volume together and go from there on potential increase.

To apply

Use the cover letter field to answer these three questions and nothing else:

Tell me about a time you had to make a decision with incomplete or conflicting information. What did you decide, and how did you decide it?
What's your typing speed, and where did you measure it?
Confirm that you can be in our office in the Cedar Bluff area of Knoxville, five days a week.

If you send a general cover letter instead, I'll assume you didn't read this far.

Job Type: Full-time

Pay: $45,000.00 - $52,000.00 per year

Work Location: In person

Job description