I’ve been to that ghost town. It’s near the “Ailen Farm” and it’s gas station.. 😉

The local economic and area amenity factors are what drive the market participants ability to participate in the housing market. Sold pricing reflects those local market participants desire of the area and their willingness and ability, or lack there of, to compete for housing, to improve housing, and other factors which ultimately set pricing and then indicate to the appraisers what value should be. Appraisers read the market, we do not set the market.

These think tanks are not properly focused because if the bureaucrats want to effect change, they’ll need to look at activities like urban renewal projects, employment, credit access, lending availability, and just everywhere except the valuation industry. The valuation industry professionals merely measure value in markets, provide opinions of value for either individual or aggregate, in strictly unbiased fashion. There is nothing appraisers can do to effect change.

Any effort to force appraisers to provide falsified, manipulated, color coded, or otherwise imbalanced value data will have a net sum zero nill effect in the end, because if the other larger economic factors which caused and led to the existing states of markets are not addressed, any manipulation of valuation principals will merely be eventually over written by existing market forces and the market participants existing behavior.

Furthermore, just because they may successfully measure value disparity does not mean there is bias. Of course when reviewing across the spectrum of different segments of society, there will be variety differences in both income, willingness to spend, housing upkeep factors, amenity, pricing desires of local persons, every other influential factor imaginable. Efforts to effect appraisers measurement methods are misguided, a waste of everyone’s time.

It may be helpful for the FNMA selling guide & HUD handbook, and even the appraisers USPAP ethics book to be less verbose and slightly more simplified, they all change so frequently. Every single meddling action all the way to forms design changes from FNMA, hybridization efforts, third party inspectors, merely make the appraisers job more difficult, which does not help consumers. If the industry wants appraisers to do a better job, get the third party people out of our business, stop changing everything, and let us focus on our jobs. We spend the majority of our time managing others, managing managers, brushing off third party companies or suffering because of them, then fielding complaints. It’s ridiculous.

Real solutions revolve around proven success stories, such as urban renewal projects. In Colorado the lower Commerce City area provides meaningful examples of real world effective efforts which have resulted in great success and have definitely improved neighborhood character, safety, opportunity, and housing value benchmarks. I posted this before but worth posting again. Stories of successful urban renewal projects nationwide are prolific and widespread. Post links like this from your areas if you know about them. Thank you.

https://www.c3gov.com/government/urban-renewal

Well put Mr. Styles