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Had a fun interview with Phil Crawford and his must listen weekly Voice of Appraisal talk show. I’ve set up a home button on my iPhone to grab each new interview. My only regret in life is not having Phil’s smooth silky radio voice. He provides a great service to the appraisal community.

Tags: Appraisal Management Companies, Podcast, AMC, Dodd-Frank, Voice of Appraisal, Phil Crawford

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Over the past few days I’ve been sent this blog post by a number of real estate appraisers who are upset with its derogatory reference to our profession. It was written by Dean Graziosi in the Huffington Post guest blogger section. I’ve never heard of him but perhaps that’s because I’m not a real estate agent. If you insert the word “scam” in your google search, there are a lot of additional insights that come up.

His Huffpost bio and web site indicates he is a NY Times Best Selling Author along with one of the top personal motivation and real estate trainers in the world. I also learned from his bio that he is a multi-millionaire, a guru in the personal motivation sector and cares deeply about his students. Translation: He basically teaches real estate agents how to sell.

Good. While it’s not my thing, I’m happy for Dean’s success (notice how his watch is strategically placed within his Facebook head shot as an indirect confirmation of his success) assuming no one was hurt. However as a public figure (as indicated on his Facebook page with 340K+ likes), Dean has a responsibility to convey information accurately to his students if he does indeed care.

While I doubt he wrote it it personally, his brand handlers managed to mischaracterize two key issues in a small blog post on HuffPost:

1. Graziosi frames the current housing market as equal to the bubble’s peak but doesn’t accurately describe what that means.
2. Graziosi frames the real estate appraiser as something other than a real estate professional while the real estate agent is a professional.
   
   

1. Housing Market

Graziosi cites the FHFA trend line as breaking even with the 2006 peak. Yes, based on FHFA methodology that’s certainly true and taken directly from the most recent FHFA report. I do feel the need to split hairs here since his “brushstroke style” of simplifying everything misaligns with reality. He says:

First, and most important, it requires repeat sales of homes, so if there aren’t huge numbers of sales, then we’re looking at a number derived from a small set of sales data. So, we’re not necessarily seeing an excited bunch of buyers flocking to the market. We are seeing a whole lot of homeowners who aren’t selling, waiting for rising values. So, we have a small inventory and competition for it.

The problem here is that there are a lot of sales outside of FHFA data – and FHFA only tracks mortgages that go through Fannie and Freddie. Roughly 30% of home sales are cash and another 5-10% of them are jumbo loans, too large to be purchased by the former GSEs – so they don’t get included. FHFA also excludes new construction.

The Case Shiller index is also a repeat sales index like FHFA but shows a different price point for the current market because it includes transactions outside of the GSE world.

If we look at the number of sales, which is the key point he makes, sales activity is low because we’re not necessarily seeing an excited bunch of buyers flocking to the market. But in reality, home sales are not low and they have been rising for 4 years. Of course sales are not at pre-crash highs because those highs were created largely by fraudulent lending practices including the unethical behavior of consumers caught up in the systemic breakdown that included nearly all particpants in the mortgage process.

Graziosi is right that inventory is low, but not because buyers aren’t flocking to the market – many buyers are being held back credit access has over-corrected. Many homeowners can’t qualify for the next purchase so there is no point of listing their home for sale.

Conclusion – we are not at the pre-Lehman market peak unless you only look through the eyes off FHFA, a distorted subset of the overall housing market. I would think that real estate gurus understand this.

2. Appraisal Industry

Let’s move on to the real reason I am writing this post.

I can ignore Graziosi’s “lite” market commentary but I can’t ignore his misunderstanding of the appraiser’s role in the purchase mortgage process (buyers applying for a mortgage to purchase a home.)

Don’t call an appraiser, as their approach to market value is different than that of a real estate professional. The real estate agent is trying to get you a sold price near to the top of the market, and their CMA, Comparative Market Analysis, is going to give you a pretty good idea of its value.

There is so much to talk about within these two sentences I’m not sure where to begin. It’s mindbogglingly simplistic, misleading and uninformed. Perhaps this is how he makes his students motivated?

Lets go for the big point first:

“Don’t call an appraiser, as their approach to market value is different than that of a real estate professional.” He must be thinking along the lines of the IRS definition, which is

To meet the IRS requirements, you need two things: spend the majority of your working time spent performing qualified real estate activities (regardless of what you do), and rack up at least 750 hours. Qualified activities include “develop, redevelop, construct, reconstruct, acquire, convert, rent, operate, manage, lease or sell” real estate.

Nary an appraisal-related definition within that list.

The problem with Graziosi’s communication skills as a best selling author and nationally renowned real estate guru who gives seminars for a living to communicate to his students (agents) how to succeed is – if we (appraisers) are not “real estate professionals” then it is a hop, skip and a jump to suggest we are “unprofessional” as if appraisers are something less than a real estate agent. Ask any consumer if they hold real estate agents in higher regard than real estate appraisers? In my view both industries don’t have sterling legacies but one isn’t more professional than another. Remember that he is used to speaking to his students who are real estate agents, the kind that sign up for this type of course. Promote BPOs and help agents get more listings – has got to be his recurring mantra.

The second issue with his quote concerning an appraiser’s value opinions – “their approach to market value is different” than a real estate agent. Providing an opinion of market value is likely the intention of both. Most real estate agents are hoping to get the listing and the appraiser is not incentivized by the home’s future sale. The agent may be the most knowledgeable person in the local market but there is an inherent potential conflict. Graziosi suggests that the broker will give you a price you want to hear. However I do like his idea of getting three broker opinions – that’s a very common practice – nothing new there. Ironically both an agent and an appraiser are looking at closed sales, contracts and listings but the appraiser doesn’t have an inherent conflict. They aren’t going to get the listing no matter how accurate their value opinion proves to be.

One problem with today’s appraiser stereotype as this column brings out indirectly, is that bank appraisers now generally work for appraisal management companies (probably about 90%) and the best appraisers tend to avoid or perform minimal AMC work because they can’t work for half the market rate. As a result, good appraisers aren’t necessarily known as well by the brokerage community as in years passed unless they get in front of the brokerage community in other ways, like giving seminars, public speaking, etc. Competent brokers within a market will know who the competent appraisers are.

There are unprofessional professionals in every industry – doctors, lawyers, deepwater diving arc welders and farmers, so please don’t make sweeping pronouncements to the contrary – especially if you are in the business of communicating information to “real estate professionals”.

Conclusions

• The real estate appraisal industry is not unprofessional
• IRS definition aside, real estate appraisers are real estate professionals

As I’ve walked through this response, I realized that the silly advice blog post in the Huffington Post by an infomercial guy did what it intended, stir up conversations of any type to get his name out there when his actual content was devoid of useful information. There is a great post I stumbled on the industry of motivational speakers: Real Estate B.S. Artist Detection Checklist. Worth a read.

Looks like I’m never going to be a multi-millionaire wearing a huge watch strategically placed in my head shot. If you notice my own head shot in the righthand column, my watch is very small.

Sigh.

UPDATE From the I have no idea for whom the appraisal is being performed but I am a 20+ year real estate professional (see definition above) department: Here’s an article from the Santa Fe New Mexican “Be cautious of appraisals” that damns appraisers using a stunning lack of understanding of the appraiser’s role in the mortgage process given his experience. This piece was written by a mortgage broker who was also a former financial consultant and real estate agent. The author states:

Everyone in every business falls under some measure of accountability. Certainly appraisers must also be accountable to their customer. The customer is the homeowner, not the AMC.

No it isn’t.

The appraiser’s client in the mortgage appraisal situation you describe is not the homeowner. The AMC is acting as an agent for the lender in order to for the lender to make an informed decision on the collateral (of course that’s only a concept). The appraiser is working for the AMC (who works for the lender) and not for your homeowner. Your logic from the housing bubble still sits with you today.

Yes I agree that the quality of AMC appraisals for banks generally stinks, but blame the banks for that, not the appraisers. Quality issues don’t change who the appraiser is working for. AMCs do internal reviews and make ‘good’ appraiser’s lives a living hell for half the prevailing market rate loaded with silly review questions by 19 year olds chewing gum to justify their own institution’s reason for existence. No wonder you are frustrated with appraisers from AMCs. ‘Good’ appraisal firms like mine avoid working for AMCs whenever possible. Yes I would be frustrated as a mortgage broker today because your industry got used to using appraisers as “deal enablers” during the bubble and nothing more. I contend that the current mortgage process post-Dodd Frank is clearly terrible and AMCs are a big part of the problem.

ASIDE This new era of online journalism for print stalwarts like the “Santa Fe New Mexican” and new versions like the “HuffPost” rely on filler-like the above 2 articles discussed here. Very sad.

Tags: Appraisal Management Companies, Huffington Post, AMC, Dean Graziosi, motivation, guru, real estate professional, seminars, scam, motivational speaker, Santa Fe New Mexican, mortgage broker, financial planner

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One of the great ironies of modern residential real estate has been the expansion in transparency of information, along with greater secrecy of ownership. I think the latter coincides with the much greater wealth that is being put into hard assets like real estate. Privacy and security are indeed very important to many, including the wealthy and especially those near the top of the financial pyramid. There is nothing sinister or unseemly about the desire for privacy. The use of limited liability corporations (LLCs) has been a legal vehicle (and a gift) from lawmakers who created it that allows people to keep certain transactions hidden from view. However the LLC also provides an opportunity for bad actors to shelter their often ill-gotten assets too.

Louise Story and Stephanie Saul of The New York Times have explored this in “Towers of Secrecy: Stream of Foreign Wealth Flows to Elite New York Real Estate,” an epic data visualization along the lines of “Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” This article is a must read covering the hypersensitive subject of high end real estate and privacy.

The ongoing debate about the dying middle class versus the booming fortunes of the wealthy, the lack of affordable housing versus the super-luxury residential tower boom and municipal governments grappling to keep construction and development moving forward to keep tax revenue flows coming in, have made this effort long overdue.

“Towers of Secrecy” is careful not to stereotype users of LLCs in high end real estate transactions as exclusively foreign buyers. Within the Manhattan market, foreign buyers are not the majority of overall high-end real estate purchasers. However they tend to be concentrated around the Midtown central business district (aka ‘Billionaires’ Row’) whereas domestic purchasers tend to favor markets found to the north and south of Midtown.

UPDATE There’s a great recap over on Curbed NY too:
Scandal-Plagued Foreigners Park Millions in Midtown Condos

Here are a few screenshots of the embedded videos within the “Towers of Secrecy” piece.

Tags: foreign buyers, Limited Liability Corporation, LLC, pied-a-terre, Louise Story, Stephanie Saul, Snow Fall, Towers of Secrecy, privacy, shell companies

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It is hard to believe it has been nearly 9 years since I wrote my first blog post. Back then I was very frustrated with real estate world around me. The housing market was booming and my appraisal competitors were increasing their staff size by a multiple of 20 (they’re now essentially out of business). We weren’t part of the (fool’s) gold rush.

Apparently I had missed a key math and ethics class in school that would help me understand what was happening and why it was happening. Everyone seemingly was losing losing their minds – appraisers, consumers, banks, rating agencies, investment banks, investors – to a word – everyone. It didn’t help that national appraisal organizations, all of whose memberships had been dropping since appraisal licensing was introduced in 1991, did not understand or were not willing to speak out about the obvious problem. Appraisers were not allowed/not able to be a neutral valuation experts for lenders to make informed decisions on lending/risk of their collateral – lenders just didn’t care because they could off-load the risk to investors around the globe. The appraisal industry was converted nearly overnight to “deal enablers.”

I saw my career ending in 3 years if I didn’t do something. I did the only thing I could think of – start talking openly about the lack of independence the appraisal industry had at that time (amazingly, how little has changed in this regard). No appraisers I were aware of were speaking openly about the problem in 2004-2005 – our industry was living in constant fear of alienating their lender clients. Since I was losing lender clients to my rapidly growing competitors who were morally flexible, I really had nothing to lose.

My first blog post was a June 23, 2005 interview with Bob Moon at APM Marketplace in a segment called “Appraising the Appraisers” My industry was a symptom of a larger problem that eventually crushed the global economy – a credit crunch.

The original APM audio link is now broken but I have it here (I hope APM doesn’t mind).

It’s a time capsule and (I believe) worth a listen.

Tags: Bob Moon, APM Marketplace Radio, Radio

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Good appraisers are unable to compete with the fly-by-night form fillers that proliferate the AMC industry.

We have done some work for the AMC of a global bank who provides mortgages in Manhattan when they are willing to pay the market rate for appraisal services. They send us requests to appraise a variety of co-op apartments in Manhattan. We recently received an appraisal request for a very large co-op apartment in a unique building (property probably worth well over $10M). The AMC offered a generic fee which is roughly 1/3 the local market rate for this type of property.

We sent them a request to be paid the market rate and was then asked to make an “exception request” and explain the reason for the higher fee so they can go back to the borrower to get approval. We are nearly always rejected.

Problem 1: Conflict of Interest Unbelievably the AMC is aligned with the borrower’s interest in cost savings without concern for quality. The AMC is in business to manage the appraisal process and therefore help protect the bank’s exposure to risk. When you get right down to it, the only value-add an AMC provides to a bank is cost containment (and they are not cheaper than banks doing it themselves) so why would an AMC be incentivized to allow the appraiser to collect a fair fee? It makes them look ineffective at cost containment.

Problem 2: Paying Lip Service to Quality The reason an appraiser is requesting a higher fee is the complexity of the assignment. What else would it be? Yet we have to write a specific request to this property which we haven’t inspected yet. In reality, the next appraiser on the conveyor belt will be selected and given a higher rating for being cooperative. This is a sham process – it is merely a way to document the appraisal process in case the regulators show up.

Here’s the standard BS response that this AMC gave to our request – this AMC is located in a rural location in the upper reaches of the northeastern US – they are concerned whether the borrower would feel comfortable paying a higher fee on a 50% cash co-op building on Park Avenue. The sender is a clerical (non-appraiser) individual who is giving the appraiser the following boilerplates response and doesn’t really understand what they are saying:

When you became an approved appraiser, you agreed to follow the processes and procedures required by [XXXXXX] by signing our Engagement Letter. We require all vendors to submit a fee exception form when they feel the work is outside of the norm. We need that information to justify your fee request to our borrowers. We are not looking to force an appraiser to complete work at low fees, we are looking to provide the best possible work at the best possible price for our borrowers. We expect that you are the expert in your market and we are looking for your expertise and explanation to make our borrowers understand why the fee may be warranted. However, we also expect the fee to accurately reflect the work involved and borrowers have the right to refuse to pay that fee and request that another appraiser be assigned. While, it may be frustrating for our appraisers, it is our current system and all of our vendors are required to follow the process.

No, it’s insanity.

Question How much do you think this clerical person understands about our specific submarket and whether they understand how much another appraiser who will work for a lowball fee does understand about our specific market?

Answer Nothing. This is merely canned comment process designed to blunt the impact of an investigation by a regulator in the future.

Here are a few other thoughts on this whole sham process:

Why Appraiser Robots Rule The World of AMCs
– In a market like Manhattan, especially for a substantial property, you could say that there is no such thing as a standard property and fees are based things like time spent on the assignment and the experience needed to handle the complexity….unless you see appraisers as robots and every assignment is the same.
– Beyond saying things like this is a unique property with limited data and would take a longer time to work on to provide a credible result aren’t enough to justify a higher fee to a borrower who wants to keep the fee low. Does the bank (AMCs client) even understand that this is happening?

So what would help an appraiser get a fee approval of any kind from this AMC? Here are a few reasons I might use next time when I have to substantiate a higher than generic appraisal fee:
-There are attack dogs in the building lobby that we have to run from and I am expecting them to tear at my clothes and force me to seek out significant medical attention.
-The flooring of the co-op apartment is believed to be covered with shards of glass and we therefore have to buy steel toed work boots to do the inspection.
-The occupant is known to carry a weapon, having assaulted visitors and did jail time as a result – so we need to buy a Kevlar vest

You get the idea. Good grief.

Tags: Appraisal Management Companies, AMC, Appraisal Pressure, Predatory Appraisal Fees

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Wlliam Black, a former bank regulator, made a TED Talk last fall that I wish I had made (but I couldn’t be as eloquent although I have a cooler tie). It should be required viewing by anyone who is connected with the housing industry.

Black’s presentation lays out the financial crisis in the proper context. He provides the recipe for disaster for all to see and it is NOT complicated to understand. Change the perverse incentives and a lot of this goes away. So many opportunities to avoid this crisis were missed.

And this is the first time I’ve heard someone talk about the unrelenting pressure that banks (and mortgage brokers) placed on appraisers, essentially forcing our industry to either make the number of get out of town. By 2007, 90% of appraisers said they were coerced by banks to make the number. That seems low to me. It had to be 100% or else those 10% of appraisers were living in a cave.

I’ll be returning to this video periodically for the foreseeable future as a reminder.

Tags: Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, OCC, TED, OTS, William Black, Regulators

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I took the photo of this door in NYS Supreme Court yesterday and it got me thinking about quality of “experts” as did this.

In a perfect world, any appraiser or analyst (in any profession) should be forced to provide expert witness testimony in court at least once – covering a paper they’ve written, research they have presented, an opinion they’ve formed, a sales pitch they’ve developed, heck even a blog post they’ve posted.

I actually like providing testimony and our firm does a fair amount of this work for our clients. Getting grilled for hours and even days by lawyers trying only to chip away at your credibility in front of others provides amazing clarity to the way you approach your analysis and profession (aside from being exhausting).

Many talking heads that opine on a housing market, a stock, a court case, etc. often aren’t tested to fully articulate their thoughts, assuming they are even thinking. Hence, BS reigns.

Tags: expert, testimony, expert witness, court

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The OCC and an alphabet soup of 5 additional regulators: FDIC, CFPB, FHFA, NCUA and the Federal Reserve issued a joint press release that if adopted, takes a small step forward in the regulation of appraisal management companies, who are largely responsible for the collapse of valuation quality since the credit crunch began.

To many, this action is long overdue. Appraisal management companies control the vast majority all mortgage appraisals in the US, having been legitimized by HVCC back in May 2009. I’ve burned a lot of calories over the past several years pointing out the problems with the AMC industry so admittedly it is nice to see them getting attention. The fact that these institutions are not licensed to do business at a statewide level but the appraisers who provide the valuation expertise they manage is inconsistent at best.

Still, the recognition of this regulatory glitch probably won’t have a significant impact on appraisal quality provided by AMCs. As my friend Joe Palumbo maintains, is like fool’s gold.

I think proposal is at least a starting point.

A couple of highlights – regulators would:

• Require that appraisals comply with the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (today we had a clerical AMC staffer tell us that writing out the math calculations on the floor plan was a requirement of USPAP).
• Ensure selection of a competent and independent appraiser. (It is unbelievable to think this is necessary but it does make the legal exposure a little larger for AMCs.)

Housingwire has a good recap of the proposed regulations and so does the Wall Street Journal provides a nice overview (I gave them background for the piece).

The proposal by the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Reserve and other regulators mandates that appraisal-management companies hired by federally regulated banks use only state-licensed appraisers with “the requisite education, expertise, and experience necessary” to complete appraisals competently.

Moral hazard There is no significant financial incentive for lenders to stop accepting the generally poor quality appraisals the AMC industry presents them daily. The hope is that the additional regulatory largess the AMCs have to confront will force the issue with lenders simply because the AMCs will have to raise their fees. Without a real “value-add” to the banks other than cost control and fast turn times, the lack of quality for a large swath of AMCs may no longer be overlooked by banks. Yes I can dream.

Residential appraisers, mostly 1-2 person shops, have largely been left without a voice and the bigger financial institutions have lobbied financial reform overtop of us without the regulators truly understanding what our role should to be to protect the taxpayer from excessive risk.

Anumber of smart appraisers I know have created a petition whose sole purpose is the get the attention of the CSFB to address the issue of “customary and reasonable” fees. Our industry has no other way to reach the regulators or the ability to lobby our views in Washington. I hope they are listening.

Tags: FHFA, Appraisal Management Companies, FDIC, AMC, Petition, OCC, CFPB, NCUA, Press Release

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The Appraisal Foundation published an appraisal infographic that attempts to clarify common misconceptions by the borrowers about the appraiser’s role in the home buying process. The content is amazingly simplistic, but that’s the point.

I continue to be amazed at how so few people don’t understand what the appraiser’s role is in the home buying process. Perhaps this is why the appraisal industry continues to be marginalized in the lending process (ie appraisal management companies, Appraiser Independence Requirements) and the exodus of competent appraisers into other disciplines outside of residential mortgages continues.

Tags: The Appraisal Foundation, TAF, Appraiser Independence Requirements (AIR)

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Here’s an excerpt from a recent lawsuit for a NYC property that struck me as high art (modified to keep parties private).

…During the same timeframe in which the Sponsor insisted it was unable to restore service to the Condominium, it was somehow possible to locate and rescue 33 trapped miners in a remote region of Chile.

Tags: Contracts

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As the credit world was unraveling around them, email communications between analysts at S&P seems to be pretty damming to their neutrality position. And finally now the lawsuit. There’s a fascinating re-write of the great Talking Heads song “Burning Down The House” by an S&P analyst.

I’ve got the entire Talking Heads catalogue on my iPhone and I’ll bet that David Byrne and the rest of the ‘Heads never imagined their music would used to describe a global credit bubble.

Here is the S&P email with the revised lyrics – as the credit world was imploding…

“With apologies to David Byrne…here’s my version of “Burning Down the House”

“Watch out
Housing market went softer
Cooling down
Strong market is now much weaker
Subprime is boi-ling o-ver
Bringing down the house

Hold tight
CDO biz — has a bother
Hold tight
Leveraged CDOs they were after
Going — all the way down, with
Subprime mortgages

Own it
Hey you need a downgrade now
Free-mont
Huge delinquencies hit it now
Two-thousand-and-six-vintage
Bringing down the house.”

Wow. Their other songs like “Wild Wild Life”, “Road to Nowhere”, and “Psycho Killer” might have also done the trick.

Tags: Talking Heads, S&P, Sub-Prime

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In this week’s WSJ Mansion section there was a nice write up by Alyssa Abkowitz about the appraisal process during a divorce: Appraisers in Splitsville. Our firm does a lot of this type of consulting and we find working with attorneys much easier than dealing with retail banks.

I also find that it’s a small world – I know nearly all the appraisers in my market personally (only a handful are active in this segment). Most are professional and knowledgable but like any profession, there are a few hacks.

The challenge in the divorce appraisal business is the challenge of proper communication between the parties – the slightest miscue can snowball into a huge complicated mess billable by the hour. The key to valuation in this process is to filter out the personal element of it and just do the appraisal. When working for one party, the appraiser never gets the whole story and magically “you’re not always on the ‘right’ side so don’t concern yourself with the details beyond the valuation.” Professionals are the ones that do their job devoid of personal bias.

Tags: Divorce, WSJ

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