Real Estate Agents- how painful are Natural Hazard Disclosures?

[Richie Thomas]

I'm in the process of studying for my California real estate license. Not for the purpose of becoming an agent (I'm a software engineer by trade), but rather for the purpose of learning more about the real estate industry, with a view to perhaps starting a business tailored to the industry.

I'm currently learning about conveyances and disclosures, specifically the Natural Hazards Disclosure Statement.  It strikes me that discovering whether a property is in a natural hazard zone might be a task which is both: 

  a) time-consuming to do manually for each of the agent's listed properties, and 

  b) super-important for the agent to perform correctly, from a liability standpoint.

I'd love the opinions of any real estate agents in this forum on this topic:

  1) How much time do you spend on these disclosures for a single transaction, in terms of both due diligence/research/looking up records and also filling out the required disclosure forms?

  2) How many transactions do you do in a given month?

  3) Are there any software tools which make this task easier, and have you used them before, and how easy/hard were they to use?

[Dennis Maynard]

Nope, there are companies or services that do it for you.  You only pick up the phone and order.  You don't do the research.  These companies have been in business for a while and insure the information.  Check out myNHD.com  or PropertyID.com