Appraisal Bill has Passed

Unfortunately the new Appraisal law has passed. This means any conventional loan will now have to be ordered directly through the lenders AMC/Appraisal Management company. The AMC is a third party vendor through which appraisal companies will now receive the appraisal assignment. The loan officer will have no input or contact whatsoever with the appraiser.

We have already seen a decrease in appraisal values and an increase in the cost with the new fee increasing from $300-$325 to $345-$385. Government loans do not currently fall under this guideline but they will probably adopt this policy as well in time.

The banking industry had a mechanism already in place to weed out unscrupulous appraisers.
All they had to do was order a review appraisal periodically and remove any appraiser found to be incompetent or unethical. The problem is, they never enforced the policy. When I was an appraiser I would receive requests to review appraisals of other firms. 3-6 months later I would receive another request from the same lender to review an appraiser whom I had already indicated was not performing his job ethically or was incompetent. There was no point in ordering a review if the lender was just going to continue using the same unethical appraisers.

It is my personal hope that in time this new law will be viewed as unnecessary and a detriment to the real estate industry as well as homeowners and will therefore be rescinded.