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It’s Time to Take Out the Junk: AMC Practices Exposed

Logan Dorman — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 12:30:23 +0000

Appraisers have spent years carrying the weight of broken AMC practices, and this article pulls every one of those practices into the sunlight so the profession can finally take out the junk. “Evil AMCs thrive not only through active malice, but also through the silence and inaction of those appraisers who could intervene.” — Edmund Burke… if he had been an appraiser It’s a conversation we’ve all had before: “I’ve already got all my information entered. I’m used to the system. I don’t want to learn a new process. I guess I’ll just keep paying the extra couple of dollars...

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First the Borrower Fee. Now the Appraiser Compensation in Court

Guest Author — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 12:30:56 +0000

Two lawsuits place Class Valuation’s fee transparency and staff-appraiser compensation practices under federal scrutiny. Most appraisal disputes examine only one part of the transaction. Two pending lawsuits involving Class Valuation, LLC approach the appraisal process from opposite directions. One asks whether staff appraisers were properly compensated for overtime. The other asks whether a homeowner was properly informed about how an appraisal-related fee was divided. The cases are legally separate. They involve different plaintiffs, statutes, and courts, and neither has produced a finding that Class Valuation violated the law. Viewed together, however, they raise a question the appraisal profession has asked...

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When Solidifi Tried to Silence Samnick

Desiree Mehbod — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 12:30:26 +0000

David Samnick has spent years warning that the AMC model would eventually expose its own contradictions. He is a Georgia appraiser, a long time critic of AMC practices, and the author of Mein Comp: The Last Appraiser, a book that traces how independence in the profession was eroded year after year by expanding corporate control. Samnick walked away from mortgage work two years ago, stopped accepting AMC assignments entirely, and now works only for private clients. He has never completed an assignment for Clear Capital. Yet despite having no active relationship with Solidifi and no reliance on their panel, he...

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Property Valuation and the Future of Data Collection

AppraisersBlogs — Wed, 29 Jul 2026 12:30:58 +0000

Property valuation is shifting fast, and the push to regulate who collects the data inside people’s homes will determine whether the process stays accurate, safe and trustworthy. Property data collection has quietly become one of the most consequential shifts in modern real estate, reshaping how lenders, AMCs and national platforms gather the information that ultimately determines a homeowner’s equity, a buyer’s loan terms and the integrity of the appraisal process itself. Yet most consumers have no idea who is actually walking through their home, measuring rooms, photographing conditions or documenting features. In many states, the answer is startling: no license,...

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The Appraisal Fee Lawsuit AMCs Can’t Outrun

AppraisersBlogs — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:30:36 +0000

The class action lawsuit filed against CrossCountry Mortgage and Class Valuation arrives at a moment when many in the appraisal profession have grown tired of watching Appraisal Management Companies (AMCs) drain the industry from the inside. Appraisers have described AMCs as unnecessary middlemen who inflate fees, hide their cuts, interfere with the work, and contribute nothing of substance. This case finally puts those practices into the record with a level of clarity that appraisers have been waiting for. The complaint describes how borrowers are charged appraisal fees that often exceed one thousand dollars, yet the appraiser receives only a fraction...

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Honoring Jan Bellas, Our Greatest Advocate

Desiree Mehbod — Mon, 13 Jul 2026 12:30:43 +0000

Jan Bellas passed away on July 7, 2026, and those of us in the appraisal profession who knew her are grieving someone who was far more than a colleague. Jan wasn’t an appraiser, yet she carried the weight of our struggles as if they were her own. She understood the pressures, the unfair treatment, the isolation, the frustration, and the constant fight to be heard, and she absorbed all of it. She had a way of making appraisers feel lighter the moment they called her. You could pick up the phone in the middle of a crisis, whether it was...

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The Board Has Spoken, and AMCs Should Pay Attention

AppraisersBlogs — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 12:30:02 +0000

The Board handled this case with the same patience appraisers have when an AMC sends “preferred comps” from another planet. Virginia’s Real Estate Appraiser Board delivered a message at its June meeting that was impossible to miss. An attorney appeared on behalf of Financial Asset Services and Brandon Sison, asking the Board to reconsider the discipline handed down in March. The request arrived without the AMC or Sison themselves, which already set an interesting tone. When you ask a regulatory board to undo a suspension, showing up in person is usually a good start. The March decision was clear. The...

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USPAP’s Typical Buyer Standard in the Fair Housing Era

Guest Author — Fri, 29 May 2026 12:30:07 +0000

The Irreconcilable Conflict Between USPAP’s Typical Buyer Standard and the Current Fair Housing Compliance Regime. Retain this document as a reference should you face a complaint grounded in disparate impact theory alone. The three-safeguard framework from Inclusive Communities provides a robust defense for any appraiser whose methodology is USPAP-compliant, well-documented, and market-supported. Introduction I want to state plainly what the appraisal profession has been tiptoeing around since roughly 2019: an appraiser cannot simultaneously comply with: 1- USPAP’s requirement to identify and analyze the most probable (typical) buyer of a property via market data AND… 2- comply with the current iteration...

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Systemic Failures in FHA Appraisal and Loan Review

Desiree Mehbod — Mon, 18 May 2026 12:30:44 +0000

This case exposed the cracks in an FHA system where failures by the lender, the AMC, and the review process aligned in ways that no borrower could have anticipated. It shows how easily an appraisal error can escalate when every safeguard designed to prevent harm breaks down at the same time. When the first article about this case ran on July 15, 2024, it already raised serious concerns about how an FHA appraisal could miss something as basic as the type of water and sewer service. What has emerged since then paints a much larger picture, one that shows how...

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Bias Accusation Collapses as HUD Clears the Appraiser

Desiree Mehbod — Wed, 06 May 2026 12:30:26 +0000

HUD just confirmed what the appraisal showed from day one: the accusation never had a pulse. If you read the original article about Steve Orlowski, the Illinois appraiser dragged through a multi year circus over a baseless bias allegation, you probably walked away thinking that surely this nightmare had to end at some point. The state had already taken its shot, the facts were already sitting in plain view, and nothing in the report supported the accusation. But as every appraiser knows, once a complaint enters the system, it tends to move forward on momentum alone, even when the foundation...

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Pickleball, Promises, and the Quiet Takeover of Appraisal

Guest Author — Fri, 17 Apr 2026 12:30:49 +0000

While they’re busy flexing their pickleball paddles, the real play is a bill quietly strip‑mining appraisers’ work. “Fair warning, we take our pickleball as seriously as we take our appraisal tech.” That showed up in my inbox this week as part of a promotion for the Appraiser’s Conference and Trade Show 2026. Smiling emojis, rally invites, reminders to book meetings with onboarding teams and partnership managers, all wrapped in a message about staying ahead of what’s next. I have been in a slowdown for four years now, so when something like that comes across my screen, it lands differently. A...

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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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Suspended: The AMC That Turned “Review” Into a Value Demand

AppraisersBlogs — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 12:30:14 +0000

Financial Asset Services and its chief appraiser did not just cross the line of appraiser independence, they marched past it so boldly that the Virginia Board suspended them both. In a rare twist involving a reverse mortgage, the push for a lower value became so aggressive that the Board ultimately issued a second suspended license to drive the point home. The Virginia Coalition of Appraiser Professionals recently highlighted a case that should make every appraiser pause. Financial Asset Services (FAS) was hired to manage a reverse mortgage appraisal, a product where the pressure often runs in the opposite direction. Instead...

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The Trainee Inside the Fast and Cheap Model

AppraisersBlogs — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 13:30:29 +0000

The trainee walked into a job expecting mentorship and instead found a crash course in misconduct. There is a widening gap in this industry between the people who actually protect the public trust and the people who only talk about it. A recent Reddit post from a Georgia trainee captured that gap with uncomfortable clarity. Not because his experience was unusual, but because it showed exactly what happens when the demand for fast and cheap collides with a profession built on accuracy, accountability, and real judgment. The trainee described a year of being sent out alone to inspect properties, told...

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From Dealerships to AMCs: Tech Fees as the New Normal

Desiree Mehbod — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 13:30:23 +0000

Tech fees have spread so far and wide that even my oil change felt like a crash course in AMC logic. Last year I went to the dealership for a simple oil change. Nothing dramatic. I was prepared to drink bad waiting room coffee, scroll my phone, and leave. Instead, the service rep came out with the classic “while we had it up on the lift” routine and told me I needed new brakes. Fine. I approved the $1,200 estimate. Not fun, but expected. When the work was done, I went to pay and noticed a mysterious $60 surcharge added...

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The AMCs: Coming Soon to a Lawsuit Near You

AppraisersBlogs — Tue, 20 Jan 2026 13:30:22 +0000

The AMCs built an entire system on silence, and now the quiet parts are being said out loud. For years, the mortgage industry has insisted that appraisal management companies are the guardians of independence, the compliance buffer that keeps lenders and appraisers at a safe distance. Yet 2025 has delivered a storyline that feels more like satire than industry narrative. Borrowers are suing, judges are listening, and the AMC business model is beginning to look less like a safeguard and more like a very expensive middleman with a very opaque invoice. The first shock came from California, where the Timmins...

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When Protecting Tenants Starts With Targeting Property Rights

Desiree Mehbod — Tue, 06 Jan 2026 13:30:24 +0000

When officials start treating property rights like a rounding error, every appraiser in the room knows the market’s about to need a stress test. New York City has never been short on bold ideas, but Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s latest appointment to the city’s Office to Protect Tenants has managed to ignite a firestorm before even warming the chair. His pick, Cea Weaver, arrives with a resurfaced video and a digital paper trail that would make any seasoned housing professional pause. Between her past social‑media proclamations like “seize private property” and her declaration that homeownership is “a weapon of white supremacy,”...

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“No Name” Licenses, No Accountability: From Highways to Housing

Desiree Mehbod — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 12:30:34 +0000

Two fatal crashes, one in Florida and one in California, have reignited national concern over so-called “no name” commercial driver’s licenses issued to foreign nationals without lawful immigration status. According to reports, truckers and government officials are sounding the alarm. Some states are allegedly issuing CDLs without verifying full legal names, allowing individuals with unverifiable identities or even criminal records to operate 80,000-pound trucks on public roads. This is not just a transportation issue. It is a systemic warning. The same structural failures that enable “no name” CDLs are now surfacing in the real estate and mortgage industries. Property data...

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The 24-Hour Appraisal Funded by Appraisers

AppraisersBlogs — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 12:30:19 +0000

The 24-hour appraisal model runs on borrowed time and borrowed credibility. Guess who’s underwriting both. Reggora’s “24-hour appraisal” pitch was flimsy from the start, and now that we’ve seen the fine print, it’s not innovation, it’s a liability handoff wrapped in buzzwords. Their shiny new “Streamlined Appraisal” is just another hybrid, bifurcated product dressed up to look like progress. And like most hybrids, it assumes appraisers are either desperate, asleep, or willing to sign off on someone else’s work for peanuts. Brian Zitin proudly explains that Reggora sends a property data collector to the home before the borrower even commits...

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App-solutely Clueless: When Sales Tries to School Appraisers

Dave Towne — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 12:30:46 +0000

A newly funded bias-checking app claims to fix appraisal discrimination, by sidelining appraisers, duplicating existing standards, and redefining valuation from the sales floor. Appraisers, this bit of news about a new bias checking app fluttered across my office floor the other day, causing me to trip. From the article: “…eliminate home appraisal bias, which happens when Black homeowners’ properties or properties in predominately Black neighborhoods are valued less than comparable properties owned by white households or in primarily white neighborhoods.” This new electronic theoretical bias checker was developed by three women in Philadelphia, who ARE NOT appraisers. Instead, they are...

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