FAcEvalue
Our membership
in profile
Andrea
Fahrenthold,
MAI, of
Montgomery,
Texas, owns
AMF Appraisal
Group Inc., a
WBE-certified
business.
By Heather
Norgaard,
Appraisal
Institute
marketing
specialist
IN THE COMPANY OF MEN
An appraiser who has made a career
out of defying others’ expectations
ACCORDING TO APPRAISAL INSTITUTE
RESEARCH, slightly more than 70 percent of
all appraisers are male. But Appraisal Institute
member Andrea Fahrenthold, MAI, of Montgomery, Texas, learned to assert herself in this
male-dominated industry. Here, Fahrenthold
shares her insights on what it takes for women to
succeed in the appraisal profession and how the
Woman Business Enterprise certification helped
her along the way.
the office and being able to use
my research and writing skills,”
Fahrenthold says.
“I was thrilled (to be a trainee)
yet nervous at the prospect of entering a field in
which I had minimal knowledge. (But) I approached
this new challenge with a vengeance.”
A PASSION FOR APPRAISING
Fahrenthold began her career as a commercial
real estate appraiser in 1986 when she landed a
job as an appraiser trainee. This was after having accepted a position right out of college with
a Fortune 500 company in a field unrelated to
appraising; she quickly realized that she wasn’t
a “corporate” person, though, and a year-and-a-half later began an intense search for real
estate appraisal firm jobs in hopes of beginning
a new career.
She had sold real estate part-time in college
and completed the educational requirements
for a broker’s license. One of the broker’s
license courses involved real estate appraisal,
which sparked Fahrenthold’s interest in
appraising: “I liked the idea of working outside
RISING TO THE OCCASION
Within her first year on the job, Fahrenthold joined
the Appraisal Institute and set a goal to achieve
the organization’s MAI designation. At the time, it
was a required five-year endeavor for candidates,
and she completed it within that time frame.
In 1990, Fahrenthold, then 29, started her
own company — AMF Appraisal Group Inc. —
and a year and a half later received her MAI
designation.
To this day, Fahrenthold strongly recommends
that fellow female appraisers become Associate
members of the Appraisal Institute. “The way I see
it, if you’re going to enter a profession, you must
seek to become the most educated you possibly
can in that field, especially if you are a woman,”
she explains. “You have to set a goal to get the cre-
dential that gives credibility to your opinion. After
all, we are paid for our opinion(s), and the most
highly educated appraiser has a distinct advantage
of being more credible.”
The bar for credibility is even harder to
obtain for women, Fahrenthold says, due to
gender discrimination, stereotyping, lack of
equal opportunity for certain assignments and
dual career-family pressure. “People would ask
if I worked for my husband and who the ‘boss’
was at my company. One client would enter our
office and head directly to a senior appraiser’s
office without even acknowledging me,” Fahr-
enthold recalls.
