Francois Gregoire

Activist Appraiser - On a quest to improve the profession

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

It's a full house at the Florida Real Estate Appraisal Board meeting

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

You know an outstanding woman in the valuation profession. Nominate. BTW, Edie Yeomans was a @F1 fan!

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

Applications are OPEN for The Appraisal Foundation’s 2026 SAVVY Award through the Women’s Forum!

The SAVVY Award celebrates women making an impact across the profession through leadership, innovation, mentorship, and service.

Applications close July 15 https://t.co/QCgwHprtLS

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

Now we have a source to explain the latest acronym "TEACH". This looks like a great in-person event.

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

You are invited to attend TEACH (Townhall for Educators on Appraisal Challenges and Happenings) during the 2026 Joint Council Meetings.
This dialogue is about the challenges and opportunities facing appraisal education, and how we can move the profession forward together.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

Real Property Appraisal is a wicked environment

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Hungarian psychologist raised three daughters to prove that any child could become a chess grandmaster through early specialization. He succeeded. Two of them became grandmasters. One became the greatest female chess player who ever lived.

Then a sports scientist looked at the data and found something nobody wanted to hear.

His name is David Epstein. The book is called "Range."

The Polgar experiment is one of the most famous case studies in the history of deliberate practice. Laszlo Polgar wrote a book before his daughters were even born arguing that geniuses are made, not born. He homeschooled all three girls in chess from age four. By their teens, Susan, Sofia, and Judit were dominating tournaments against grown men. Judit became the youngest grandmaster in history at the time, breaking Bobby Fischer's record. The story became the gospel of early specialization. Pick a domain young, drill it hard, and you can manufacture excellence.

Epstein opens his book by telling that story honestly and then quietly demolishing the conclusion most people drew from it.

Chess works that way. Most things do not.

Here is the distinction that took him four years of research to articulate, and that almost nobody who quotes the 10,000 hour rule has ever read.

There are two kinds of environments in which humans develop expertise. Psychologists call them kind and wicked. A kind environment has clear rules, immediate feedback, and patterns that repeat reliably. Chess is the cleanest example. Every game ends with a winner and a loser. Every move is recorded. The board never changes shape. The pieces never invent new ways to move. A child who plays ten thousand games will see most of the patterns that exist in the game, and pattern recognition is exactly what chess mastery is built on.

A wicked environment is the opposite. Feedback is delayed or misleading. Rules shift. The patterns that worked yesterday may be exactly the wrong patterns to apply tomorrow. Most of the real world looks like this. Medicine is wicked. Investing is wicked. Building a company is wicked. Scientific research is wicked. Almost every job that involves a complex changing system with humans in it is wicked.

The Polgar sisters trained in the kindest environment any human can train in. Their success was real and the method was correct. The mistake was generalizing the method to fields where the underlying structure of the environment is completely different.

Epstein's research is what made the implication impossible to ignore.

He looked at the careers of elite athletes outside of chess and golf and found that the pattern was almost the inverse of what people assumed. The athletes who reached the very top of their sports were overwhelmingly people who had played multiple sports as children, specialized late, and often switched disciplines well into their teens. Roger Federer played squash, badminton, basketball, handball, tennis, table tennis, and soccer before tennis became his focus. The kids who specialized in tennis at age six and trained year-round for a decade mostly burned out, got injured, or topped out at lower levels of the sport.

The same pattern showed up everywhere he looked outside of kind environments. Inventors with the most patents had worked in multiple unrelated fields before their breakthrough work. Comic book creators with the longest careers had drawn for the most different genres before settling. Scientists who won Nobel Prizes were dramatically more likely than their peers to be serious amateur musicians, painters, sculptors, or writers.

The skill that mattered in wicked environments was not depth in one pattern. It was the ability to recognize when a pattern from one domain applied unexpectedly in another. That kind of thinking cannot be built by drilling a single subject. It can only be built by accumulating mental models from many subjects and learning to move between them.

The deeper finding is the one that should change how you think about your own career.

Specialists in wicked environments often get worse with experience, not better. Epstein cites studies of doctors, financial analysts, intelligence officers, and forecasters showing that years of experience in a narrow domain frequently produce more confident judgments without producing more accurate ones. The expert builds elaborate mental models that feel comprehensive and turn out to be increasingly disconnected from the actual structure of the problem. They stop noticing what does not fit their framework. They mistake fluency for understanding.

Generalists do better in wicked domains for a reason that sounds almost mystical until you understand the mechanism. They have less invested in any single mental model, so they abandon broken models faster. They are used to being a beginner, so they are not threatened by the discomfort of not knowing. They have seen enough different domains that they can usually find an analogy from one field that unlocks a problem in another. The technical name for this is analogical thinking, and the research on it is one of the most underrated bodies of work in cognitive science.

The single most useful sentence in the entire book is the one Epstein puts almost as a throwaway.

Match quality matters more than head start.

A person who tries six different fields in their twenties and finds the one that genuinely fits them will outperform a person who picked one field at fourteen and stuck to it on willpower alone. The lost years were not lost. They were the search process that produced the match. Every field they walked away from taught them something they later imported into the field they finally chose.

The reason this is so hard to accept is cultural, not empirical. We tell children to pick a path early. We reward the prodigy who knew at six. We treat the late bloomer as someone who failed to launch on time, when the data suggests they were running an entirely different and often more effective optimization process underneath.

The Polgar sisters were not wrong. The conclusion the world drew from them was.

If your environment is genuinely kind, specialize early and drill hard. If it is wicked, and almost every interesting human problem is, then the people who win are the ones who refused to specialize until they had seen enough to know what was actually worth specializing in.

You are not behind. You were running the right experiment all along.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

That's @AppraiserActive on that panel.

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

Thank you to Foundation partner the National Association of Mortgage Brokers for inviting Board of Trustees Chair Frank Gregoire to their conference to talk about the work the Foundation's boards and how the appraisal profession is always better when stakeholders come together.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

@ChrisMurphyCT You, sir, suck

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

@AdamKinzinger @ChrisMurphyCT You, sir, blow

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

@SacAppraiser a couple of months ago while teaching classroom appraisal CE course, neither of the two projectors would project. My co-instructor, a genius, initiated a zoom meeting for the in-person class. Everyone had the presentation at their desk.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

You MUST have e something to say about this!

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

FINAL DAYS TO COMMENT

The Exposure Draft comment period closes April 13.

Don’t sit this one out.

Read it.
Comment on it.
Make your voice count.

https://t.co/1ymoBttihf

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

This meeting is less than a month away. If you are involved in real estate or valuation, please make an effort to attend. The registration fee is $00.00. You will meet plenty of great folks and have the opportunity to interact with them in meetings and informally. See you there!

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

Looking ahead to May
We’re preparing to convene the 2026 Spring Board of Trustees and Partner Organizations Meetings in Fort Lauderdale, FL, May 6–8.

The Westin Fort Lauderdale
Event details and registration are available under the Events tab on our website.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

If I was seeking a degree, it would be in real estate

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

Thinking about a career in real estate or valuation?
The University of Colorado Boulder now offers an approved path to help students work toward becoming appraisers, right from the classroom.

Your future in appraisal starts here.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

Florida Real Estate Appraisal Board meeting!

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

Last weeks' assignment. Value this view.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

A surprise for use #oldtimers Look what arrived today from @cotality Marshall & Swift. Made this Friday the 13th a lucky one!

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

South Florida Friends. This is worth checking out. From what I hear, some folks from Florida Realtors and @MiamiRealtors will be participating. Insurance on the agenda.

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

Miami is calling!
The 2026 Spring IAC Public Meeting is just three weeks away.

Whether you’re a longtime participant or new to IAC meetings, this public meeting is a great opportunity to engage and stay informed.

Register under the Events tab on our website

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

@SacAppraiser Current ride. 2017 FORD Focus RS. Turbo 4, All Wheel Drive, 6 Speed. Faster than the V-8

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

@SacAppraiser 1963 Ford Fairlane Sport Coupe. 260 V-8, 4 Speed.

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

You do not have three days. You have until tomorrow! The 2027 Targets are Agricultural Real Property, Mass Appraisal, Eminent Domain, International Valuer, Consumer Advocate, Veterans, Banking/Lending/Finance and Academics.

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

Only 3 days left to apply for The Appraisal Foundation’s Board of Trustees!
We’re filling three Public Interest seats and want your voice at the table.
Deadline: February 27, submit your application before it’s too late!
https://t.co/tKAAJUHVD6

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

Noticed while taking photos of Comparable Sales. Currently listed at $11,000,000. Started at $12,995,000. On the market over 400 days. What do you think?

[Francois Gregoire @AppraiserActive]

I'll be sitting in on this one tomorrow. There is still time to register

[The Appraisal Foundation @TheAppraisalFdn]

Happening Tomorrow!
The 2026 ASB Public Meeting is just one day away. Don’t miss this opportunity to hear live updates from the Appraisal Standards Board on February 19, 1–2pm ET.
Register now before we go live:
https://t.co/Gxn82wBfII