Real-estate appraiser regulation is a failure
CHARLOTTE, N.C. - As soaring home prices set the stage for America’s great housing meltdown, a critical step in making sure those home sales were a fair deal - the real estate appraisal - was undermined from within.
After the nation’s last major banking disaster, Congress set up a system to catch rogue appraisers. Their game: inflating the value of homes at the direction of equally unscrupulous real estate agents and mortgage brokers, whose commissions are determined by the size of the deals.
But a six-month Associated Press investigation found that the system is crippled by both the bumbling of its policemen and their inability to effectively punish those caught committing fraud.
And despite ample evidence appraisers are pressured into inflating home values - sometimes to prices in support of loans that are more than buyers can afford - the federal regulators charged with protecting consumers have thus far made a conscious choice not to act.
“The system is completely broken,” Marc Weinberg, the former acting director at the federal agency charged with monitoring the appraisal industry, told the AP before he retired earlier this year. “It’s amazing that the system ever worked at all.”