The fact that I don’t know who LREAB is and I have been an appraiser for 40 years makes it clear that they are not making much of an impact! Please tell me who VACap is and what they do and have accomplished.

The Appraisal Institute has two lobbyists; both of them are ignorant; neither of them is an appraiser! The guy who handles Federal issues was a former mattress company lobbyist; the guy who handles State issues is a failed politician who ran for local office in Maryland, and I checked him out; he didn’t raise one dime for his campaign! Of course he lost, so basically the formerly most influential appraisal organization has incompetent lobbyists. NAR has tons of money from their realtors to lobby, and they win, so appraisers lose. simple math!

If you want to know what is going on, don’t watch Fox news; they are essentially trump news. They lie like he does, and they are anti-regulatory because they are only representing uber rich people. Hannity owns a lot of apartment buildings; he eats dinner with trump often, and he says whatever is good for trump, and he doesn’t care if he is lying to protect a corrupt president. Tune in to something worthwhile that actually reports news, written and reported by real journalists; Fox is an “entertainment” channel, not a news channel. Try ABC, NBC, CBS, NPR and PBS if you want real news! News on our profession is not understood by non-appraisers because it is too complicated for the general public to understand.

The people at TAF are politicians, and the lobbyists for banks and realtors have unlimited money to influence this organization. Also, they actually do nothing to improve the profession, they bend with each blowhard who has their ear. TAF is a creation of the banks who don’t want appraisers to do their job; that way they can control all the loans made, and give fannie and freddie all the access to selling the loans on the secondary market where wall street brokers wheel and deal with your retirement 401k or your home. It has become a country of the investor class, so the banks are just engineering a new bailout; that way they can eventually own all of us. Bankers couldn’t be trusted and caused the Great Depression which led to the creation of the American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers (AIREA) which developed the educational courses we take and created the Ethical Canons to protect the public trust. Now this political organization, TAF, has stolen the AIREA mission statement and act like they are the utmost authority on our profession. They are just screwing up everything, then we have those computer nerds creating magic software driven by algorithms that are programmed by non-appraisers; data people! Their sales people say they are just as good as we are, so fannie and freddie jumped on that and banks want to do it, and they are already doing loans with no physical inspection, paying a non-appraiser to take a few exterior photos and running an AVM. This will crash the economy in the end, and if you live long enough, you just might be in demand after the next crash and we finally get our profession back. Please don’t depend on Fox to give you the news that will clear this up! We are the only ones who can do that! TAF has failed to be effective because they don’t do anything but make changes to USPAP and qualifications to become an appraiser, and the appraisers on the board are paid whores!

I’m often taking a moment to inform realty agents about the dire state of the appraisal industry, and the emerging movement to replace us with unlicensed inspectors and tech people. The general consensus from licensed agents is that the appraisers job is highly difficult, usually well respected, most think we should get paid better and remain in place. There is often a clear sense of relief when I tell them the appraisal request was not sourced from any third party or amc company.

Take a photo of everyone speaking, and replace their face with their corporations logo. They’ll all be there, except for individually licensed people. Agreed though, someone needs to schedule this in immediately. Somebody important, well mannered, experienced, but most importantly is not going to be advocating for big corporations and big tech, but rather will advocate for everyday hard working full time focused appraisers whom does not agree with the use of hybrids or waivers.

Seek the truth.