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How Bureaucratic Overreach Turned Real Estate Appraisers into Scapegoats 18

How Bureaucratic Overreach Turned Real Estate Appraisers into Scapegoats

This is what bureaucratic overreach looks like: a maze of rules with no exit, a hearing held while you’re hospitalized, a lawsuit dismissed but still billed. Bureaucratic overreach isn’t a policy flaw, it’s a strategy.  If you’re a real estate appraiser in 2025, odds are you’ve already met Kafka. Not in a literature class, but in your inbox, via a letter from HUD, a complaint from a borrower, or a summons from a regulatory agency that’s decided your opinion of value is now a civil rights issue. The federal government isn’t just investigating appraisers, it’s industrialized the process. Hundreds of...

A Review of MEIN COMP: The Last Appraiser 33

A Review of MEIN COMP: The Last Appraiser

If Orwell moonlighted as an appraiser, and Kafka had a side hustle in compliance, “MEIN COMP: The Last Appraiser” by David Samnick would be their love child. But this isn’t dystopian fantasy, it’s a forensic autopsy of a profession that was methodically dismantled while regulators smiled, and algorithms sharpened their knives. Samnick’s book is fiction the way a courtroom sketch is fiction. The names are changed, but the faces are familiar, and the tactics are real. Through a cast of fictional appraisers, each representing a phase in the slow-motion collapse of independent valuation, we witness the insertion of middlemen, the...

AMC / Appraisal / Appraisal Management Companies / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / Trending

The 24-Hour Appraisal Diet: Slim on Time, Light on Credibility 31

The 24-Hour Appraisal Diet: Slim on Time, Light on Credibility

Brian Zitin’s declaration that the appraisal “bottleneck” has been obliterated by Reggora’s 24-hour turnaround reads less like a breakthrough and more like a tech startup’s victory lap around a profession it barely understands. According to the post, decades of valuation nuance, regulatory compliance, and boots on the ground expertise have now been solved, at no extra cost to the borrower, in every location, and without compromising standards. All it took, apparently, was a few million dollars and a launch video. It’s a bold claim, not because speed isn’t desirable, but because speed without substance is just marketing. The idea that...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Technology / Appraisers News / Automated Valuation Models / AVM

The Town With No Bank: How Rural America Lost Its Mortgage Lifeline 10

The Town With No Bank: How Rural America Lost Its Mortgage Lifeline

For decades, we’ve been told that the problem is demand. That people don’t want to live in rural America anymore. That lending dried up because the buyers disappeared. That it’s just the market working as it should. But what if we’ve been telling the wrong story? Because when you look closely, when you actually follow the data, the decisions, and the people left behind, it turns out rural America didn’t walk away from mortgage credit. Mortgage credit walked away from rural America. The Collapse of Local Lending Up until the 1980s, a family in a small farming town could walk...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Software / Appraisal Technology / Appraisers News / Automated Valuation Models

Inflated Prices, Taxed to Death 11

Inflated Prices, Taxed to Death

Freddie, Fannie Have Unwittingly Stoked Property Tax Firestorm. Inflated home values, engineered by Fannie and Freddie’s appraisal waivers and algorithmic lending, have distorted the market and saddled taxpayers with rising property tax burdens.  A wildfire is scorching the earth. Flashpoints are Texas, Florida, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, New Jersey, Ohio, Nebraska and Wyoming. There are others. Consider: The average U.S. home price in midyear 2020 was $371,100. In just two years, it jumped 41% to $525,100, as reported by the St. Louis Fed. Property values have risen almost 27% faster than inflation since 2020, according to...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / Automated Valuation Models / AVM / Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac

The Harbor Model: Where Appraisers Take the Helm 22

The Harbor Model: Where Appraisers Take the Helm

The Harbor Model offers a bold blueprint for restoring transparency, authorship, and oversight in a valuation industry long dominated by silent data extraction. The author of this article has chosen to remain anonymous, not out of fear, but out of necessity. Since 2012, they’ve been developing a disruptive valuation model that challenges entrenched interests in the appraisal and AMC industries. Their work has drawn direct confrontations from AMC owners and industry insiders, many of whom are threatened by the implications of these proposals. Anonymity, in this case, is a shield, not from scrutiny, but from retaliation. If you want to...

AMC / Appraisal / Appraisal Management Companies / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / Automated Valuation Models

No, Appraisers Didn’t Cause America’s Racial Wealth Gap 19

No, Appraisers Didn’t Cause America’s Racial Wealth Gap

Appraisers are being dragged into the racial wealth gap debate, but the real gap is between racial accusation and actual evidence, and courts aren’t buying it.  After years of feckless payouts by insurance companies and corporations, the era of using the courts to harass appraisers for their value opinions has ended. Last week, a U.S. District Court judge in Maryland threw out a discrimination lawsuit on summary judgment. It was brought against an appraiser by a militant professor at Johns Hopkins University and his wife, who passed away since the filing of the suit. She, too, was a professor at...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / Trending

The AMC Industry Won’t Be Toppled by Code 17

The AMC Industry Won’t Be Toppled by Code

Call me when AI stops summarizing and starts suing, because until it drags the AMC industry into court, raids their coffers, and rewires the entire system they broke, it’s just another overhyped spectator in the plunder parade.  We’ve entered an era where more people are giving AI broader directives, asking bigger questions, and expecting deeper responses, only to receive yet another AI-generated summary. But what, exactly, is AI doing in response? That’s the real limitation of the tech. Right now, millions are spinning their wheels in digital circles, posing complex problems to a machine built to mimic intelligence. And when...

AMC / Appraisal / Appraisal Management Companies / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / The Appraisal Foundation

Baghdad Bob of Freddie Mac Merits Mention As Mideast Erupts 22

Baghdad Bob of Freddie Mac Merits Mention As Mideast Erupts

In true Baghdad Bob fashion, Scott Reuter leads Freddie Mac’s effort to ensure that no inconvenient fact is left uncensored.  For a brief time in April 2003, Saddam Hussein’s charismatic Information Minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, became a worldwide pop-culture icon. During the invasion of Iraq, al-Sahhaf faced reporters on the roof of a Baghdad hotel. All around him, columns of smoke billowed and sirens blared. Glide bombs shook the earth. American and British coalition forces poured into the city. Denying reality, al-Sahhaf insisted: “There are no American troops in Baghdad!” The next day, Baghdad fell. But al-Sahhaf’s gift for bombastic...

Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Software / Appraisers News / Fannie Mae - Freddie Mac / Federal Housing Administration

FOIA, AI, & the Appraiser’s Defense: A Blueprint for Fighting Back 25

FOIA, AI, & the Appraiser’s Defense: A Blueprint for Fighting Back

Targeted under the guise of equity, I faced baseless accusations with no due process — until I used FOIA, uncovered the truth, and turned the tables. But I had a secret weapon: I used artificial intelligence. For decades, appraisers have worked in silence, held hostage by regulations, scrutiny, and — recently — false narratives of systemic racism. When the Biden administration launched the PAVE Initiative, it claimed to champion equity in housing. But behind the curtain, it became a political tool. The result? Appraisers like me were targeted based on ZIP codes, stripped of due process, and labeled racist —...

AMC / Appraisal / Appraisal Management Companies / Appraisal News / Appraisers News / E&O

Washington Appraisers Stung by Fee Hikes and Veto 19

WA Appraisers Stung by Fee Hikes and Veto

Washington state appraisers are facing skyrocketing fees to cover a debt caused by mismanaged funds — while a veto blocked relief, leaving them to pay for a problem they didn’t create.  In Washington, where evergreen forests meet bustling real estate markets, appraisers are caught in a bureaucratic drama that’s anything but charming. Robert Mossuto Jr., owner of B.N. Appraisals, Inc., with over two decades of experience appraising residential real estate, recently took to LinkedIn to expose a saga of skyrocketing fees, mismanaged funds, and a gubernatorial veto that’s left the state’s nearly 3,000 credentialed appraisers reeling. This tale is as...

ACOW / Appraisal / Appraisal News / Appraisal Organizations / Appraisal Subcommittee / Appraisers News

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