Author: Jeremy Bagott

August 18, 2022

Racial Targeting Under the Heading of Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

This time around, the racial targeting is masked as a virtue under the heading “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” or “DEI.” Valuation Jiu-Jitsu Will Lead to Future Addie Polks Addie Polk was a 91-year-old African-American widow who shot herself in the chest in 2008 during a Fannie Mae-initiated eviction in Akron, Ohio. It marked the low point in Fannie’s embrace of toxic mortgages. Fannie, now in federal conservatorship, bought or guaranteed subprime loans made to vulnerable borrowers in the years leading up to the 2007-2008 financial crisis. There are now signs of new abuses. Under the banner “equity and inclusion,” some...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Organizations / Appraisers News / Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac / Trending

August 11, 2022

Justice for Texas Appraiser? You Bet. Price Tag: $99,000

The Texas Appraiser Licensing and Certification Board is a hot mess, but one with a malicious and callous streak. That makes it dangerous to licensees. The Unclean Hands Doctrine is a legal defense. It helps prevent petitioners who are engaged in fraud, deceit or bad faith from recovering certain damages from others. If you’re a known cattle rustler yourself, the Unclean Hands defense may keep you from recovering damages if your own cattle go missing. It’s also sometimes called the “Clean Hands Doctrine” or the “Dirty Hands Doctrine.” Based on this doctrine, the feculent fingers of the Texas Appraiser Licensing...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Organizations / Appraisers News / TALCB / Texas Appraiser Licensing & Certification Board

Appraiser Will Help Expose Occupational Licensing Abuses Nationwide

August 1, 2022

Exposing Occupational Licensing Abuses Nationwide

She went from viewing occupational licensing as a necessary means to protect the safety and welfare of the public to a cynical tool promoted by established businesses to erect barriers against innovation and competition. Her experience as a licensed real property appraiser in West Virginia turned out to be the perfect training ground for the study of public corruption, restraint of trade and government overreach. Who would have thought it? After 27 years of being whipsawed by West Virginia’s notorious appraiser-licensing apparatus, the Appraisal Foundation – and the latter’s continually changing copyrighted standards – and a complicit federal monitor, Lori...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Organizations / Appraisers News / The Appraisal Foundation

July 14, 2022

Appraisers Should Closely Watch Probe of Departed Brookings Boss

The chief of the Brookings Institution, a retired four-star general, resigned last month under investigation of lobbying on behalf of a foreign government and then covering it up. If the allegations are true, it means the think tank, under the general’s watch, was secretly taking illicit cash from at least one outside interest group at a time it was engaged in research that irreparably damaged the reputation of the nation’s real estate appraisers. Astute appraisers wondered whether Brookings might have also been influenced by any well-placed donations from other groups, such as the powerful lobbies of the Realtors, home builders,...

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July 7, 2022

Fannie’s ‘Equity’ Plan: The Drinking Game

What makes equity so invidious as a governing tenet is that it involves not just helping people of one racial or cultural group but it has the effect of knocking struggling members of disfavored groups out of the game. One type of parlor game relies on players’ ability to maintain their memory, logic and articulation – all while getting blotto. These alcohol-fueled “think and drink” games are highly challenging. Even Britain’s royal family engages in such diversions if Netflix’s “The Crown” is to be believed. The games have names like “Bizz Buzz,” “Ibble Dibble,” “Never Have I Ever” and “Roman...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac / Federal Housing Finance Agency / FHFA

Corrupt West Virginia Occupational Licensing Board Scheming Ends

July 1, 2022

West Virginia Appraisal Board Scheme

The Doomed Quest to Reform a corrupt West Virginia Licensing Board “Board members earn money working for a law firm that files lawsuits against appraisers,” said one West Virginia appraiser… Readers of DC Comics will be familiar with Bizarro World, a cube-shaped planet that is home to a weirdly inverted version of reality. The planet is governed by the Bizarro Code, whose ungrammatical main tenet is, “Us do opposite of all Earthly things!” But “Bizarro World” doesn’t nearly describe a scheme in which a West Virginia occupational licensing board has joined hands with a law firm that has managed to...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Organizations / Appraisers News / The Appraisal Foundation

June 21, 2022

Appraisers Should Bristle

Stealthy vice again masquerades as public virtue. The head of yet another government-subsidized nonprofit was found funneling cash to cronies while raking in obscene compensation. The nation’s long-suffering appraisers will recognize the pattern in a porcine publisher they are forced to frequently slop as frenzied Beltway porkers go whole-hog on the swill. Revelations surfaced recently about a New York City nonprofit receiving government subsidies to aid the homeless. The nonprofit then lavished a garden of earthly delights on its boss and his cronies. Jack Brown, the chief executive of CORE Services Group, a New York City provider of services...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Organizations / Appraisal Subcommittee / Appraisers News / ASC

May 11, 2022

Occupational Licensing Used to Intimidate

It provides no better illustration of how occupational licensing promotes groupthink and intolerance to differing viewpoints… CALIFORNIA: WHERE RIGOROUS INQUIRY GOES TO DIE It smothers innovation and silences debate. These have been principal criticisms of occupational licensing over the years, and nowhere is innovation and debate under greater attack than in California. Last year, lawmakers there passed a bill tasking the state’s regulator of real estate appraisers to apply lopsided scrutiny to valuations that come in “low” (a friction point with the state’s powerful Realtors, lenders and homebuilders). California lawmakers now want to use the state’s medical board to intimidate...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / Trending

April 11, 2022

Appraisers Take Heed

Her plight is an attack on occupational licensees everywhere. The nation’s long-suffering real estate appraisers, under attack by Congress in an election year, should pay close attention to what has happened in Nashville… Nurse’s Plight Signals Dystopian Future for Occupational Licensees; Appraisers Take Heed To err is human, but not if you’re a licensed nurse in the Regulatory Republic of Tennessee, where “dog eat dog” has become the state’s unofficial motto. In a first of its kind, a medical accident has resulted in both a license revocation and a criminal prosecution as a nurse was both stripped of her license...

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March 11, 2022

Anti-Appraiser Agenda

Money may have been used to buy influence and promote the current anti-appraiser narrative being embraced by key public servants in the executive and legislative branches. TOOL MAY HELP APPRAISERS CONNECT DOTS TO UNRELENTING CHARACTER ATTACKS It’s reminiscent of a practice pioneered by Texas savings-and-loan kingpin Tom Gaubert in the 1980s. The idea was to have employees at his crumbling institution and those of his friends funnel a large number of small-dollar political donations to his buddy, Democratic House Speaker Jim Wright. The speaker, one of the most corrupt to hold the position (and that’s really saying something), spread the...

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