Author: Ann O'Rourke

What if you don’t want to do desktop bifurcated appraisals or the very tough appraisals that don’t work for AVMs? Or, wait, once again, for the lender market to finally come back. There are many forces trying to get field appraisers out of doing full valuations for mortgage loans. Automation and Artificial Intelligence will increase this trend, as it has done in other professions. For example, Quicken dramatically decreased demand for manual bookkeepers. Once lenders can determine which properties will work with an AVM, there will be fewer human appraisals. Recently, several appraisers emailed and called me saying their non-lender...

…standards written in weasel words… Appraisal is not rocket science, but it’s been around for about 300 years and it worked pretty well when the principles were kept simple and the consequences for ignoring them were disastrous. It would also have been nice if individual lending institutions still had to hold their own loans into perpetuity. The “Just Pap” is more unpopularly known as the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice, which came into being after the last big residential mortgage greeding frenzy (the failure of S&Ls in a 17%-mortgage-rate environment during the late 1980s). Before your friendly author proceeds...