Shaun Murphy Jr. I wish I could afford not working for 2 weeks but I def understand the sentiment. But it would take more than me. If all of us did it then yeah we could prob change stuff.

Nicholas Bochicchio just don’t do their work..

If every Appraiser stopped doing AMC work for 2 weeks, the ball would be in our court

Nicholas, Congress cares about the appearance of caring. As long as the unenforceable laws that are passed don’t actually have to be enforced, then they can look as concerned as they want without risking donations. Dodd-Frank was such as law.

FNMA is nothing more than a money pump. Processing the highest possible number of securities possible is the only objective. As long as they have scapegoats they are content to allow known overvalued loans to fly on through. “Bad appraisal; or bad computer data or glitch in the algorithm” will be the next recession or housing crash’s mantra.

NAR & state Realtors don’t yet fully understand how exceptional their liability is going to be. They are being fed lies by the software hucksters and mortgage bankers lobbies

Some people still care Nicholas – The American taxpayers and consumers – or at least those that have become informed on the issues do.

What on earth are these new products? Just noticed them in the Mercury products section.

Per Roses’ comments; You’d think that for all the glorious millions and millions of dollars the big name players take in, from amc to realty to lending, they’d have like giveaways or promos where they’d buy a condo outright and just put someone into a home free and clear or have dedicated housing the company owns they would at least lease out free of charge limited terms to help families get back on their feet. All this charity and community awareness activity is just for show, they have enough money they would not miss helping a stranger but they really don’t do that. Rather, they seek to put all the under represented aspiring middle class appraisers out of business. Dang! Picked the wrong career again.

Their strategy is to drive us out of business and demoralize us so we will work for peanuts; these are people, not like us, who have no skin in the game. We do; hell, I’ve been working as an appraiser since 1979, but apparently I am not qualified to do lending work??? Part of the plan is to make us tired of fighting; we have adapted to upgrades in the standards for appraisals in the effort to protect the public trust, and now they are willing to throw that all away, asking the buyer to pay $500 for a waiver of an appraisal, essentially saying, “trust us”. Who is us? The banks, wall street and fannie and freddie. Next, opportunity zones will be the new thing, and so they want to be able to manipulate another bailout when they steal our equity again! Engineered bailouts are all the rage; S&L 1989, 2008 Financial Crisis, and all kinds of bad things are said about appraisers. Now we have to compete on time with an algorithm, and they want it for cheap. Cheap and fast doesn’t protect the public trust.

I say when computers buy houses, then I don’t care if they use zillow! We are working with our hands tied behind our backs when we are licensed and insured; they want us to appraise something we haven’t seen? And they’ll have some guy they got on craigslist to take photos who is paid $1.00 per photo so they at fannie can say we don’t need an appraisal on this because we have zillow! This opens up a lot of room for fraud, and they are just paving the way!

Unlicensed people have their fingers in our profession and they are like fishhooks that have our whole profession hurting, and the public is definitely not served! Just because we use math to do our job doesn’t mean we should let numbers rule the result! People buy homes and there is some social awareness of trends and human behavior that is worth considering in light of the numbers that guide residential appraising. Commercial has to make financial sense, but trends will make it what the copycat investors expect when they buy income property. All real estate is local, but someone who is out of state and doesn’t see the property is doing an appraisal from their desk in another state? Not good. We know that, but the public looks up their house on zillow and it says it is way higher than they knew, so right now there are a lot of equity loans that are approved without an appraisal. Rates are down right now, so a lot will refi and get some cash, and later could lose their homes if there is another downturn. It is already so expensive to buy and rent, there are so many homeless, so we need to strengthen the programs that allow people (like military, teachers, police officers, etc) to own rather than rent. It makes people take care of the property much better, and it is good for the community. Yes, build more, maybe smaller and denser projects so we don’t have these people on the streets everywhere!

Not always. Particularly if hundreds of other appraisers copy and paste the same letter into their own emails to the Committee, or write their own separate letters. The links to write to are embedded above. It was a letter not too different than this that helped stop the early Pace Pro product. Did you know that our federal regulators, as well as many state regulators, also read Appraisersblogs.com?

Our level of engagement is often suggested by the nature and number of comments here.