[StBernard] Appraisal Opinion of Value - can rarely be changed.

[Westley Annis]

Hey Westley,
 
Happy New Year to you and yours, and to everyone out there.  I've gotten
some calls recently from folks I've done appraisals for in appealing their
Road Home valuation - some I did well over a year ago and they're just
recently are finally receiving their "yellow letter."  I make a point of
that because some of these appraisal valuations I did before the Road Home
program fine tuned their appeals process with their "20% margin of error
rule" when hiring your own appraiser to appeal their valuation.
 
The situation that has come up is the folks who are calling me are asking if
I can lower my valuation (often by just a few thousand dollars) to
accommodate the 20% rule.  The answer is... I cannot.  Not only would doing
that have serious ethical implications, but even legal ones.
 
What needs to be understood here is when an appraiser gives you his/her
opinion of value, basically you are getting an official statement of an
opinion of value.  However, if the appraiser is later informed he/she was
given incorrect information about the house (i.e. it has/had fewer square
footage, less bathrooms or bedrooms) that could result in a corrected lower
value, then the appraisal could be "amended" to reflect a value in line with
the provided correct data about the subject property.  Otherwise, it is
fraud to just change the property data and value.
 
I even had one client who then suggested to me could I just say they gave me
too high of a square footage figure and I doing an amended appraisal based
on the new correct data.  I don't think I need to tell you the cons of
fabricating data.  Besides, another problem with that was I either measured
the home and attested to that in the appraisal with a confirmed floor sketch
or I took the information directly from the realtor's sale listing when the
property was previously sold - also stated in my appraisal report.
 
Unfortunately, an appraisal cannot work like the old Henny Youngman joke....
a man is told by his doctor he only has six months left to live...the man
replies I can't afford to pay your bill....the doctor then shruggs his
shoulders and says "okay, you have twelve months."
 
Unless the data on the subject changes, an appraiser's opinion is final.
 
Besides, I find that to be a backwards way of looking at the situation -
asking an appraiser to lower his valuation to accommodate someone else's
"wrongful" valuation that was too low to begin with.  What you need to do is
ask the Road Home folks to re-evaluation their valuation of your property so
that it might end up coming in higher so that it will be within 20% of my
valuation - that is where the whole problem started.
 
I also find it a little funny that some these folks initially thought my
pre-Katrina valuation of their home was low, but now they're asking me to
lower it.  I do realize they're just fed up with the entire process and want
to get it over with - but as I've explained, lowering my opinion of value in
an arbitrary manner is not possible.
 
I sincerely hope everything works out for the best for everyone dealing with
the Road Home program.
 
John Scurich