Stan Tish is a San Francisco Bay Area real estate appraiser and forensic real estate consultant who has served attorneys, developers, investors, and corporations on a host of assignments including environmental impacts, casualty loss, estate tax valuation, and property tax appeals, just to name a few.

Karin Payson is a California- and New York-licensed architect, expert in sustainable design, interpreter of planning code ambiguities and a mediator of often conflicting owner, planning department and neighborhood interests.

David Murphy is a structural engineer, real estate consultant and forensic expert from San Francisco who has turned his keen eye on analyzing building failures due to design, construction, and maintenance or combinations thereof, in the West Coast, Hawaii, New York, Illinois, Florida and Pennsylvania.

The three and more like them were all gleaned from the 30-year-old Rolodex of Bill and Merrie Lightner owners of the San Francisco-based Lightner Property Group, a boutique property management and real estate development company, to create Opine Experts, a high-end talent agency for real estate experts designed to help attorneys and others take the guesswork out of vetting powerhouse experts.

Other options are to sift through the Yellow Pages, tackle trade group search engines, wade through questionable referral sites or use other hit-and-miss resources.

"Opine Eperts was born out of necessity as a one-stop-shop for high-level real estate experts using a 30-year-old Rolodex and our in-depth expertise in real estate and law," said real estate attorney Bill Lightner, co-founder of the new operation.

"Real estate touches our lives every day, and it can be complicated. Our goal is to make finding pre-screened specialists hassle-free. To jumpstart the process, people can search our website for talent or feed us an S-O-S and we'll do the legwork to locate the best expert," Lightner said.

Consider Opine Experts a talent agency that matches the expertise of contractors, structural engineers, property managers, lawyers, consultants, forensic experts and other specialists with law firms, civil litigators, insurance defense, investors, and more for a variety of needs including litigation support, due diligence investigations, and project management.

Currently, a small start-up, Opine Experts includes more than a dozen professionals, who alone bring nearly 70 specialty areas of expertise to the roster.

Consider it a matchmaking operation with a personalized assist, tapping a limited pool of genuinely talented, objective experts who are more than biased mouthpieces.

The site also comes with a journal where the experts double as bloggers offering insight on everything from building codes and real estate bubbles to paperless property management and seismic retro-fitting historic buildings, as well as offbeat items, including a warning about hypersensitive HVAC units.

The site offers high-brow service reflected in its content and design. That makes Opine Experts' site clean and easy to navigate, but hard to forget.

Bookmark it.

"Site To See" is a DeadlineNews Group series of reviews of content-heavy websites deemed unique, consumer-friendly, informative and easy to use.

Published: June 30, 2011

Use of this article without permission is a violation of federal copyright laws.

A journalist for 35-years, Broderick Perkins parlayed an old-school daily newspaper career into a digital news service offering editorial content and consulting services. Perkins' San Jose, CA-based DeadlineNews Group includes the flagship news site, DeadlineNews.Com, offering real estate, personal finance and consumer journalism, and a backshop, the Deadline Newsroom.