It should of been a dumb correction. Enough said

Well, sounded like an investigation was started. Then politics. Most likely bribes. And the entire thing went no where.

There is no actual oversight. Although people pretend there is. If the main players run afoul of the rules at hand, they simply change the industry policies and make what used to be illegal, now currently legal.

Case in point, a few examples.

Appraisers must personally inspect, it’s essential for quality appraisal and consumer safeguards. Not anymore. Now appraisers are not allowed to inspect to protect from ‘appraisal bias’. Consumers are better off with convicted felons and illegal migrants inspecting their homes and taking tons of photographs of private belongings and private spaces, performing property data collectors PDC programs. You’ll just have to trust them. No fingerprinting program will be required for PDC’s like it was implemented nationally for appraisers.

Full service appraisal is necessary to protect the consumers and the program. Not anymore. Now discounted desktop and remote service is required and mandated. Appraisal modernization assists in higher loan volume. fnma; ‘to increase efficiency and capacity.’ Full service appraisal takes too long and consumers don’t need that much consumer protection anyways. Your pal; FHFA

Mandatory field reviews of so much work and third party auditing to assure against xml file tampering. Not anymore. That simply costs the lender money they’d rather spend elsewhere. Who cares if a little fraud gets through now and then, or like, all the damned time. Pass the losses back to the taxpayer and when people lose their homes, the insider investors get a lot of benefit from that. Mission accomplished. No problem here, sometimes it’s necessary to alter XML appraisal files ‘for reporting consistency.’ Field reviews don’t really hold up anymore anyways, especially when reviewers learn that one appraisal firm is getting 90% of the work for the entire area and dials everything in with unlicensed inspection runners and outsourced services. Thanks Appraisal Coach.

I could go on, but what is the point? Consumers lost. Big time. So did honest appraisers. Honest ethical process is yesterdays news. The appraisal trade group people appear to be pre occupied running their amc companies and making a fortune on the exploits.

When AMCs starting appraiser selection based on lowest fee instead of worthiness, this created a cesspool of unreliable bottom feeder appraisers. My best guess is most of the error riddled appraisals come from the aforementioned appraiser types. A seasoned, reliable appraiser doesn’t do what the appraiser did in 2024.

Forgot to mention. FHA announced it will also adopt 3.6 forms, but are going to follow up the twins, and have not yet run a firm implementation date. The appraisal industry now represents an eerie sort of propaganda approach. Why you should care more about the never ending changes and should not focus on consumer protection anymore. Rethink appraiser independence. Go ahead and abandon small business, embrace the franchise model instead. How to utilize third party outsourcing seminars, brought to you by the third party outsourcing companies. How to crush competition and be the last appraiser standing. They’re embracing the concept. The appraisal industry is more backwards than ever as the trade group representatives lurch from one embarrassing public disclosure to the next, in between ‘vaca planning’. Never ending unethical shameless self promotion masquerading as sound practice advice. The new multi pathways to licensing. Not too long from now we’ll have licensed appraisers whom don’t even live in this country doing most of the desk work. They continue to quest to create more appraisers without answering the basic market conditions which cause licensee attrition in the first place. The predictable unintended consequence will be exponential increases of consumer exploitation.

The july O’Rourke is a piece. Tim’s article on litigation appraisal was very good. Where as the other article on 3.6 adoption is quite embarrassing. He’s recommending that appraisers stand there and talk into a tablet to form fill as they’re inspecting on site with the home owner. Visualize the scenario he’s suggesting. An appraiser would stand there mumbling every minor home defect into his tablet device right in front of the home owner. Imagine actually doing that. No respect for the home owner to point out every critical detail. Being blatantly incompetent. The scope creep is tremendous and now with 3.6 the appraiser is supposed to also function as a general contractor and recommend repairs with a service quote price, for insurable properties. That’s supposed to be a specialty of reo appraisers and is not something origination appraisers were expected to do. So much for subject to recommendations from a qualified professional. We do not need to report HERS energy efficient ratings or broadband providers in the area. Even most homeowners could not answer the HERS rating question for their own homes.

GD that is an excellent post. True. Absolutely true. Borrowers are on their own. The nature of gse lending institutions has been co opted by special interests and no longer functions to serve their intended goal of primary focus on consumer protection, safe mortgage management protocols, and safe lending access.

The entire reason for appraiser licensing was consumer protection. The various regulatory structures were intended to protect consumers from the harms of runaway predatory lending.

We’re right back where the industry started (via official licensing of appraisers), with far fewer safeguards or consumer protection mechanisms in place.

Writing has been on the wall. It has become legal to fee skim from consumers and demand gratuity fees from vendors. Pay to play is the new normal. Harmed consumers has become an irrelevant factor regarding gse rule making and operational planning. Checks and balances have been systematically dismantled in favor of central planning and bureaucratic prioritization of internal profits and favor trading. It’s not what you know at the gse’s, it’s who you know. The policies are completely inconsistent and change to polar opposite approaches based on the politicians of the day. Favor trading at the American consumers expense. The system has been steadily changed to accomplish what it was meant to prevent; the whole sale sell out of American consumers wealth and safety in their own homes. The massive wealth transfer continues. There is firm motivation to place people into over leveraged situations, so that when they do go under, the property is transferred directly to the benefit and ownership of institutional investors the gse’s were supposed to place limitations upon.

The only way for a consumer to stay safe is not to play. I talked to a lady doing a reverse mortgage the other day and she said that her current lender was calling her weekly to engage in repeat refinances. It’s pretty difficult to tell the difference between private investors, mortgage lenders, and straight scam artists these days. They all operate the same way with the same goal; Exploit consumers.

This was the purpose of the appraisal program; to provide guard rails. A check to the balance. An intermediate designed to slow down the system, which prevented fraud from taking root. The fraud is now so firmly rooted, they don’t even bother to keep up the illusion. Which is why everyone says in unison; ‘Appraisal modernization’. The true meaning of appraisal modernization has morphed in very short order to represent the elimination of sensible consumer safe guards.

These people do not even understand their own rules or how sensible process used to work. They did not include net/gross indicators in the 3.6 form. They moved away from plus minus classical mathematical expression and treat the home like a financial ledger, using parenthesis instead. Did you read the certifications yet? The three year disclosure rule was for disclosure. Instead they turned this into a prohibition. You’re not allowed to provide repeat service within three years now. Total clown show.

In other words lets cut the red tape that saves the lender money and allows them to escape accountability. Not to mention the over 2,000 record pending FOIA request that will prove that they were not “requiring” them in the first place.

June 23, 2026

FHA Slashes More Red Tape to Promote Homeownership Affordability

Today, the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) published its next sweeping set of policy updates for its Single Family mortgage insurance program executed through a series of Mortgagee Letters (ML). These 14 individual updates, launched as part of HUD’s recognition of National Homeownership Month, are designed to reduce costs, mitigate risk, and make mortgage credit more accessible for prospective American homebuyers with FHA-insured mortgages in accordance with President Trump’s Executive Order Promoting Access to Mortgage Credit.

These updates bring the total to more than 150 streamlining measures taken in the FHA Single Family program since the start of the Trump administration.

Today, FHA issued the following MLs:

Updates to FHA Quality Control Requirements for Appraisal Field Reviews. Through this ML, FHA is making field reviews an optional component of the appraisal quality control (QC) process. FHA previously required mortgagees to obtain appraisal field reviews on at least 10 percent of their origination and underwriting QC samples. By making field reviews optional, FHA is maintaining its core appraisal compliance framework while giving mortgagees greater flexibility to tailor review methods based on case-specific risk.

Appraisal field reviews represent one of the most expensive quality control components of the lender appraisal review process, with an average cost of $425 per field review. FHA estimates that eliminating this requirement will save industry partners approximately $3.3 million annually, meaningfully improving the cost structure for FHA lending.

Postscript 5/29/2026
FHA has opened a public comment period on modernizing its Minimum Property Requirements. This case fits directly into the issues they are asking for feedback on, including whether current MPRs protect borrowers and how the appraiser’s scope of work should be updated. Comments can be submitted through the Federal Register (Docket No. FR‑6609‑N‑01) until June 29, 2026.

Postscript 5/29/2026
FHA has opened a public comment period on modernizing its Minimum Property Requirements. This case fits directly into the issues they are asking for feedback on, including whether current MPRs protect borrowers and how the appraiser’s scope of work should be updated. Comments can be submitted through the Federal Register (Docket No. FR‑6609‑N‑01) until June 29, 2026.

Postscript 5/29/2026
FHA has opened a public comment period on modernizing its Minimum Property Requirements. This case fits directly into the issues they are asking for feedback on, including whether current MPRs protect borrowers and how the appraiser’s scope of work should be updated. Comments can be submitted through the Federal Register (Docket No. FR‑6609‑N‑01) until June 29, 2026.

Postscript 5/29/2026
FHA has opened a public comment period on modernizing its Minimum Property Requirements. This case fits directly into the issues they are asking for feedback on, including whether current MPRs protect borrowers and how the appraiser’s scope of work should be updated. Comments can be submitted through the Federal Register (Docket No. FR‑6609‑N‑01) until June 29, 2026.

Postscript 5/29/2026
FHA has opened a public comment period on modernizing its Minimum Property Requirements. This case fits directly into the issues they are asking for feedback on, including whether current MPRs protect borrowers and how the appraiser’s scope of work should be updated. Comments can be submitted through the Federal Register (Docket No. FR‑6609‑N‑01) until June 29, 2026.

Postscript 5/29/2026
FHA has opened a public comment period on modernizing its Minimum Property Requirements. This case fits directly into the issues they are asking for feedback on, including whether current MPRs protect borrowers and how the appraiser’s scope of work should be updated. Comments can be submitted through the Federal Register (Docket No. FR‑6609‑N‑01) until June 29, 2026.

Postscript 5/29/2026
FHA has opened a public comment period on modernizing its Minimum Property Requirements. This case fits directly into the issues they are asking for feedback on, including whether current MPRs protect borrowers and how the appraiser’s scope of work should be updated. Comments can be submitted through the Federal Register (Docket No. FR‑6609‑N‑01) until June 29, 2026.

14 hours of CE for continuous USPAP violations! Theres the first problem.

This seems like something appraisers should organize and pursue. Use the funds to roll back this nonsensical anti bias training and compensate victims of false accusations.

On Monday the Department of Justice announced the Anti-Weaponization Fund which aims to compensate victims of government weaponization. It is financed to the tune of $1.776 billion by a settlement which resolved President Donald Trump’s lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service over the leak of his tax returns.