Retired! You’re late to the party. Checking the jobs boards was inspiring. There is such fierce demand for qualified skilled workers. Regardless if I were to chose janitor, parks tech, programs administrations assistant, assessor entry level, forensic review, any number of ancillary positions with new construction outlets, I’m bound to get a significant raise. Nowhere to go but up! Got to look at the bright side. Thinking of new home sales, as that does not even require a license and the average pay is literally three times what I gross now with potential for a +10x earnings factor. Or I could relieve myself of the stress, get some vacation days, punch in punch out at a regular assessors desk for a mere 150% of what I earn now, + benefits. If we’re going to lose the rich experiences involved with getting out there for personal appraisal inspections, all the connections we make being there in person, and knowledge we gain through that process, but instead lose our freedom of time management, I think it’s fair to say most of us want benefits and vacation days instead.

Hi Mike. Thank you for jumping in. Not sure why you’d volunteer for the abuse of this industry but thank you none the less. I’m 100% for what Elizabeth said below. Ideally we’d be able to continue using the exact same form, and have that somehow auto fill the new form. Then appraisers like me would do interesting things like scan in the old form format all filled and adjusted nicely, as an image or pdf attachment in our reports alongside this updated mess of a new form. I think at FNMA we have a problem of programmers struggling to stay relevant and somehow prove they should keep their jobs. Forms redesign is unnecessary. I suspect they’re basement dwellers working remotely whom don’t even own pc’s and struggle to do everything involving traditional appraisal forms on their mobiles, hence the focus on mobile friendly form re design. In case you were not aware, here is the ‘old 1004 form’. As one can observe, the format was redesigned for somewhat easier readability but not much else changed. Looking back, I like the old forms quite a bit too. You should contract with alamode and click forms for some compensation for your efforts and because most appraisers will need some sort of integrated function into their software in order to make use of any open code options which may lend to minimal workflow disruption. It’s all wishful thinking though, fnma’s new focus is actively disrupting the appraiser community on purpose in order to pave the way to automate us out of existence.

By purposefully confusing traditional norms from form filling to sketching and measurement standards, to uncoupling the vital functions and knowledge base appraisers have by way of personal property inspections with third party inspectors instead, fnma simultaneously are staging the ‘appraisal form’ to be capable of being filled by anyone and then have analysis results supplemented by automatic valuation analysis software. With an additional benefit of making loan repurchase activity more difficult to achieve since people working under these new restrained conditions will have to come up with a hundred different random quirky methods and then some in order to comply with the illogical mandates the petty dictats fnma is pushing out, and nobody will be able to reverse engineer the development method. This is very clever yet deeply nefarious, using mandates and unwelcome industry restructuring to shift even more liability towards appraisers. Obvious is obvious. Even if in their ignorance the developers at fnma do not understand this is what they are accomplishing, that is what they have done. (Insert pr statement why appraisers should embrace these changes here.)

https://e-appraise.com/pdf/70-FHLMC_1004-FNMAE.pdf

I’d be happy if we input on the regular form and then press a button afterwards that will format it into a report FHMA wants. I would want an extra line in the grid now that we have these ANSI issues.

You can get a copy of the current 1004 form for software development below. Tag it or check back later this year for the new form.

https://github.com/michaelostrowski/1004

Additional free or open source technologies
http://www.hp-12c.com
https://github.com/michaelostrowski/UAD-listing-history-formatter

Totally agree, that’s what the Majority of Residential Appraisers are in this country- Old Men (& Women) & we’ve had enough! We want to chew on trees. Flibertyfloo!

Greg York hold the door I’m right behind you

Do you recognize the familiarity of the ‘updated design’? It’s made for mobile devices. The blocky cumbersome design and wasted page space is a dead give away. This is far more disappointing than we could have ever imagined.

My go to management strategy of ignoring something until it goes away may not pan out this time.

I’m with the old timers, 35+ years is enough. The day that form is implemented I’m done (if not sooner…)