Appraisal Articles

Welcome to the ongoing HVCC nightmare that continues until next Christmas… From what has been said, HVCC is here to stay, or until someone in Congress pulls a rabbit out of their hat, we are stuck with it until the Sunset Clause, 18 months from 05/01/2009. So maybe next year we will have a chance for a Merry Christmas...

Can You Believe It?

I keep thinking that someone will see the damage that HVCC has done and is doing, but no one outside the lending community seems to care. As appraisers with a large customer base, at Creekside, we have made it... barely. But I know many other appraisers who have had to leave the business, because all of their business is just gone…

It has been a rude awakening for many of us self–proclaimed “independent fee appraisers”, the few of us that are left. More and more it has been necessary to sign on with various AMC groups just to have any of the FNMA business back. Not that it is much worth doing, since the fees are structured so that the AMCs take the lion’s share of the money for doing next to nothing and having “0” liability.

But seven months into HVCC and I am anxiously looking forward to next Christmas and the potential end to this mess. I think the concept of HVCC has merit but the application in the Banking world has been fraught with lack of education, lots of misunderstanding, and all around general misinformation.

We can only hope that the cost of our “freedom from coercion” does not end our freedom to run a successful independent appraisal shop.

So until then I wish you and yours a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Hang in there…

And hurry up Sunset Clause...

Comments? Email me.

We can only hope that this year will be better than last year. You don’t want to say that it could not possibly be worse, because karma like that is not something to mess with.

Can You Believe It?

And it has certainly been a memorable decade, from the highs of the refinance bubble of 2003 to the abysmal lows of the last year to now… We can now say in retrospect that it was a bubble, because we are on the back side of it. But back then it seemed like the orders would never end. Who would have predicted that one day they would end? Unfortunately I think that day has already come for some appraisers.

When HVCC took effect May 1st, 2009, no one, least of all me, could have predicted that AMCs would virtually engulf the entire appraisal industry. However, this is what has happened. Whether an intended consequence or not, AMCs own the lion’s share of the appraisal business today and I am not sure that we can reverse this fact. Even for instance, if HVCC ended tomorrow, I do not believe that banks would revert to the pre-HVCC condition of ordering appraisals themselves. It is too far gone for that...

So what do we do about it? We need to regulate AMCs, period. These AMCs are not going to go away, so if we are going to have to deal with them, there should at least be a level playing field.

I don’t think HR716, poised to go before the House of Reps in NC, is a panacea; it will not fix everything. But it will help.

For some appraisers who have already lost their business it will be too late, but for those of us still doing appraisals it may be just enough to keep the ‘independent appraiser’ alive…

Comments? Email me.