Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac - Appraisers Blogs

Flags Over Facts: The Road to Obsolescence

Desiree Mehbod — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 12:30:03 +0000

The latest round of modernization comes wrapped in friendly language, but the flags are hard to miss if you’ve been paying attention. For years, appraisers have been warning that the mortgage industry was slowly engineering us out of the process. We were told we were paranoid. Resistant to change. Stuck in the past. Then the newest Mortgage Credit Executive Order arrived, and the appraisal section opened with a single line that confirmed everything we’ve been saying: expand AVMs, desktops, hybrids, and AI. That’s the priority. Everything else in that section is just polite filler wrapped around a strategy to shrink...

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When Appraisers Rally: Korea Sends the U.S. a Wake-Up Call

AppraisersBlogs — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 12:30:30 +0000

In Seoul, appraisers didn’t write op-eds. They didn’t file quiet complaints. They rallied. And Korea took notice. On September 29, the Korea Association of Property Appraisers (KAPA) staged a public protest outside KB Kookmin Bank’s headquarters, condemning the bank’s in-house collateral valuations as illegal under Korea’s Appraisal Act. The Ministry of Land had already ruled the practice unlawful, yet banks continued hiring internal appraisers to fast-track high-value loans. KAPA’s response? Signs, speeches, and a full-throated demand for accountability. Meanwhile, in the United States, appraisers face a quieter, but no less existential, threat. Not just from the GSEs, but from banks...

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The Town With No Bank: How Rural America Lost Its Mortgage Lifeline

Dallas T. Kiedrowski, MNAA — Fri, 29 Aug 2025 12:30:24 +0000

For decades, we’ve been told that the problem is demand. That people don’t want to live in rural America anymore. That lending dried up because the buyers disappeared. That it’s just the market working as it should. But what if we’ve been telling the wrong story? Because when you look closely, when you actually follow the data, the decisions, and the people left behind, it turns out rural America didn’t walk away from mortgage credit. Mortgage credit walked away from rural America. The Collapse of Local Lending Up until the 1980s, a family in a small farming town could walk...

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Inflated Prices, Taxed to Death

Jeremy Bagott — Thu, 21 Aug 2025 12:30:52 +0000

Freddie, Fannie Have Unwittingly Stoked Property Tax Firestorm. Inflated home values, engineered by Fannie and Freddie’s appraisal waivers and algorithmic lending, have distorted the market and saddled taxpayers with rising property tax burdens. A wildfire is scorching the earth. Flashpoints are Texas, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, New Jersey, Ohio, Nebraska and Wyoming. There are others. Consider: The average U.S. home price in midyear 2020 was $371,100. In just two years, it jumped 41% to $525,100, as reported by the St. Louis Fed. Property values have risen almost 27% faster than inflation since 2020, according to...

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The Harbor Model: Where Appraisers Take the Helm

AppraisersBlogs — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 12:30:17 +0000

The Harbor Model offers a bold blueprint for restoring transparency, authorship, and oversight in a valuation industry long dominated by silent data extraction. The author of this article has chosen to remain anonymous, not out of fear, but out of necessity. Since 2012, they’ve been developing a disruptive valuation model that challenges entrenched interests in the appraisal and AMC industries. Their work has drawn direct confrontations from AMC owners and industry insiders, many of whom are threatened by the implications of these proposals. Anonymity, in this case, is a shield, not from scrutiny, but from retaliation. If you want to...

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Baghdad Bob of Freddie Mac Merits Mention As Mideast Erupts

Jeremy Bagott — Thu, 26 Jun 2025 12:30:32 +0000

In true Baghdad Bob fashion, Scott Reuter leads Freddie Mac’s effort to ensure that no inconvenient fact is left uncensored. For a brief time in April 2003, Saddam Hussein’s charismatic Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, became a worldwide pop-culture icon. During the invasion of Iraq, al-Sahhaf faced reporters on the roof of a Baghdad hotel. All around him, columns of smoke billowed and sirens blared. Glide bombs shook the earth. American and British coalition forces poured into the city. Denying reality, al-Sahhaf insisted: “There are no American troops in Baghdad!” The next day, Baghdad fell. But al-Sahhaf’s gift for bombastic...

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UAD 3.6: The Appraisal Industry’s Shiny New Straightjacket

AppraisersBlogs — Fri, 30 May 2025 12:30:22 +0000

UAD 3.6, the appraisal industry’s shiny new straitjacket, promises efficiency but threatens to bury appraisers under a mountain of data demands and tech troubles, risking the integrity of valuations in a quest for modernization. The appraisal industry is bracing for the rollout of the Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD) 3.6, a supposed game-changer slated for an optional beta in September 2025 and a mandatory debut by November 2026. Promising to drag appraisal reporting into the modern age with a sleeker, property-specific framework, UAD 3.6 has appraisers across the country muttering a mix of cautious hope and outright skepticism. But let’s be...

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The Appraisal Profession’s Perfect Storm: A Veteran’s Take on a Dying Craft

Desiree Mehbod — Fri, 02 May 2025 12:30:49 +0000

The new UAD form, the AMC fee gouging, the waivers, the false bias claims. It’s a perfect storm of assaults. I’ve been an appraiser since 1993, back when fax machines were cutting-edge and the internet was a clunky novelty. Over three decades, I’ve seen this profession weather storms, economic crashes, regulatory overhauls, you name it. But what’s happening now? It’s not a storm; it’s a tsunami. Our industry is hemorrhaging talent, drowning under false accusations, and getting squeezed by corporate greed and bureaucratic overreach. As someone who’s stubbornly refused to bend the knee to Appraisal Management Companies (AMCs), I’m here...

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Fannie Mae’s Conservatorship: A Babysitter’s Blunder

Guest Author — Mon, 28 Apr 2025 12:30:06 +0000

Calling the FHFA a babysitter for Fannie Mae doesn’t fully capture the dysfunction. What the general public doesn’t understand is that Fannie Mae has been under conservatorship since the 2008 market crash — a status far from ideal, just one step from bankruptcy. By definition, a conservatorship is a legal arrangement where a court appoints a conservator to manage the affairs of an entity unable to do so itself, due to financial distress or other incapacity. It’s a polite term for babysitting an organization that can’t handle its own affairs. A Babysitter Who Sparks Chaos Calling the Federal Housing Finance...

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A Cry from the Appraisal Trenches: The Fall of GSE Oversight

Guest Author — Fri, 25 Apr 2025 12:30:13 +0000

That could bring our best and brightest back to GSE lending, leveling the playing field with fairer work distribution. Picture this: a system built to protect homeowners, backed by taxpayer dollars, now teetering on the edge of betrayal. The regulatory framework governing Government-Sponsored Enterprises (GSEs) was once a fortress of consumer protection, transparency, and fairness. As an appraiser, I’ve watched this fortress crumble. The rules imposed on GSEs and their partners—our trade-off for their congressional charter—have been chipped away through years of cunning maneuvers by trade groups and stakeholder interests. What’s left is a hollow shell, far removed from the...

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Fannie Mae Fraud and Abuse Exposed

Jeremy Bagott — Fri, 18 Apr 2025 12:30:41 +0000

History of waste, fraud & abuse at this rogue organization… Fannie Mae reported this week it had fired more than 100 employees for unethical conduct, including facilitation of fraud. Expect more such news as the truth emerges about this organization’s activities over the past half-decade. At the beginning of the decade, under the protective camouflage of its federal conservatorship and Covid-19, Fannie began eliminating critical checks and balances in a radical experiment with U.S. taxpayers’ money and the U.S. economy. The mortgage giant began scrapping or weakening long-accepted underwriting safeguards like standard FICO scoring, title insurance, mortgage insurance, downpayments and...

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Data Cancer Infecting the Real Estate Market

Jonathan Miller — Fri, 31 Jan 2025 13:30:21 +0000

They have created the phenomenon known as “data cancer” which reduces an appraisal to a rubber stamp that contaminates the comps used for future sales. The ability to do an appraisal for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac is getting rarer these days now that the GSEs are waiving appraisals on the majority of transactions. Despite drones being everywhere and the GSEs being in receivership, the latter is desperate for higher loan volumes to feed their origination infrastructure. Higher mortgage rates have crushed refinance loan volume and slowed sales volume. What can the GSEs do to increase mortgage volume? Remove appraisals...

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Appraisal Industry Outlook Under Trump Administration

AppraisersBlogs — Mon, 06 Jan 2025 13:30:04 +0000

In a recent article, John D. Russell, JD explored the potential impact of the new Trump administration on the appraisal industry. With Republicans set to control the legislative process, Russell analyzed various documents and comments to distill expectations for how appraisal-related issues may be handled going forward. He noted that the Trump administration’s efforts will likely reflect much of the Project 2025 platform, and that its approach to the GSEs and FHFA in the first term could mirror that of the previous administration. Late first-term efforts on housing finance reform may also provide insight into second term priorities. Regarding the...

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ARCC Discussion Exposes GSEs Agenda to Reduce Appraisal “Friction”

AppraisersBlogs — Fri, 22 Nov 2024 13:30:11 +0000

Mark Calabria’s discussion with ARCC revealed the GSEs’ agenda to reduce “appraisal friction” by eliminating the role of professional appraisers and the appraisal process altogether. The recent discussion hosted by the Appraisal Regulation Compliance Council (ARCC) with Mark Calabria, the former Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), offered a rare and illuminating glimpse into the inner workings and mindset of the nation’s housing finance regulators. During the engaging conversation led by ARCC Chair Josh Tucker, Dr. Calabria shared his expert perspective on FHFA’s controversial decision to significantly increase the use of appraisal waivers, which allow mortgage lenders to...

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Is a Horde of Deadbeat Borrowers Again Walking Among Us?

Jeremy Bagott — Mon, 04 Nov 2024 13:30:44 +0000

There are signs of a new horde of deadbeat borrowers, but the foreclosure filings are being delayed and masked by the government itself. Some of the current deadbeat borrowers will learn to expertly work the system… In 2022, a San Ramon, California, couple who hadn’t made a mortgage payment since 2009 was finally evicted. Anita and Mahesh Khurana had put on a masterclass in the use of the courts to keep foreclosure at bay. The holdouts had lived in their home payment-free for 13 years. A state court finally ruled they had exhausted all appeals, and they were ejected. In...

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How Deep Fakes Have Burrowed Into Home Finance

Jeremy Bagott — Mon, 14 Oct 2024 12:30:11 +0000

Fannie and Freddie have been toiling at the coalface of “synthetic appraisals” – “black box valuations.” In the 1960s, technocrats at the Pentagon used the latest IBM mainframe computers to analyze complex data related to the Vietnam War. Planners fed punch cards into the machines and ran endless simulations, hoping to determine strategies for winning the war. In 1967, analysts finally asked the computer, “When will we win in Vietnam?” The machine’s answer: “You won in 1965.” It exposed the hubris and naiveté of those who believed computer-generated models could capture and quantify millions of complex human interactions on the...

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New UAD Overhaul: What Appraisers Can Expect in 2025 & Beyond

Dave Towne — Thu, 19 Sep 2024 12:30:42 +0000

Folks, I recently attended a Train the Trainer 1.5 day class about the new UAD/URAR, jointly facilitated by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Aloft. About 20 other instructors from across the US were also present. This class is required before this new UAD material can be taught to other appraisers, under contract with the GSEs. My info below is a limited high-level summary for the new UAD and URAR of what was presented, and what the appraiser community can expect to see, from now into 2026. It is not meant to be comprehensive; I may send out other info as...

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Stoked by HUD, Cottage Industry Shakes Down Mom-and-Pop Appraisers

Jeremy Bagott — Fri, 06 Sep 2024 12:30:11 +0000

The harassment campaign benefits a number of odd bedfellows: the housing lobby, which wants unfettered access to federal funds and taxpayer-backed mortgage guarantees through Freddie, Fannie and the FHA – they see appraisals as an unnecessary bottleneck. A firm called Mizrahi Kroub is the largest filer of so-called “digital Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuits.” The New York law firm files about a quarter of all such cases nationwide, according to a provider of web-accessibility services. The firm, which employs nine lawyers, has brought more than 1,100 web-accessibility cases against small businesses for missing alt-text, incorrectly formatting lists or providing unclear...

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Objectionable Valuations Become Hate Speech, Inflating Home Prices

Jeremy Bagott — Wed, 21 Aug 2024 12:30:33 +0000

The censorship, scapegoating and sidelining of appraisers has done real damage to borrowers and the purchasers of bonds… Attacks on free speech are on the rise in the English-speaking world. A bill introduced in Canada to thwart online “anarchy and lawlessness” would create a Canadian Ministry of Truth empowered to punish authors Ottawa politicians find problematic. In response to the worst rioting in Britain in years, about 4,000 people have reportedly been jailed for online thought crimes. U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer has vowed to prosecute anyone his government believes is whipping up people’s emotions on the Internet. There’s even...

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Insights from CFPB’s Public Comment Period

AppraisersBlogs — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 12:30:20 +0000

The comment period on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) “Request for Information Regarding Fees Imposed in Residential Mortgage Transactions” concluded on August 2, 2024, with a total of 959 comments received. Upon reviewing some of these submissions, several noteworthy perspectives emerged regarding appraisal fees and the role of Appraisal Management Companies (AMCs). The National Association of REALTORS® (NAR) highlighted the lack of transparency surrounding AMC fees, which are often bundled together with the actual appraisal fee on the Closing Disclosure (CD). This opaque structure prevents consumers from understanding the true cost of the appraisal service and hinders their ability...

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