Currently working at a family office helping to run their real estate platform and closed-end funds ($200M+).Previous experience at Hines out of their DC office working on master planned community development, 3M SF mixed-use development, predevelopment for various other projects, and a life-science acquisition.Prior to Hines, I worked for three years at a GP PERE shop doing acquisitions east of the Mississippi.

Other attractions include Mc Wane Science Center, Birmingham Botanical Gardens, Vulcan Park and Museum, and Sloss Furnaces National Historic Landmark.

There's not a lot of science to it. 

it's just looking at comps and keeping an eye on the market not rocket science just art with lots of practice 

Yes I think this is where developers make their money, but it's obviously not an exact science.

Of course your/my mileage may vary - but this seems such a standard thing to do, I can not imagine it's worth thousand dollars of contract rocket science.  

That’s the “part art, part science” aspect.

As @Theresa Harris said, the kind of job they do is not necessarily rocket science so finding a new one should be very possible relatively soon.

But…(time for the longest run on sentence in history.)I don’t have to meet or background applicants, they have advertising down to science, they charge late fees I may not have, they actually know how much rent should be while I just looked for 2-3 close by, they know when/how local laws have changed as we become more and more like California East, they have a boatload of vendors that want to keep them happy for the amount of business they get and have no problem fixing emergencies right now, or Sunday at midnight, property managers are taken more seriously than the landlord directly, they save me some accounting time, I literally spend 15-20 minutes a month on my accounting and 0-30 minutes per month on property management, Much of that HOA related, Basically I think they earn at least 1/2 their fee in extra income so maybe in the end I’m spending 4% to do almost zero work.

This has the obvious weakness of the unknown nature of future cap rates, but that's really the heart of your question here.Estimating future cap rate is part art, part science.