A commentator asks about my experience with crooked appraisers and I confess, I never met one. The appraisers I’ve dealt with, whether I represented the buyer or the seller, were all highly professional people who took great care coming up with defensible comparables. Not one ever asked me what the price “had” to come in at and I never caught so much as a hint that they were willing to bend rules.
Looking around now at a number of failed building projects I realize I was naive to think there was nothing untoward going on. At least, I can’t imagine how some of these projects received the funding they did without the help of an appraiser who departed from common sense and history. The news is filled now with stories of appraisers and real estate agents going off to jail for collaborating in mortgage fraud schemes but I never saw that in Greenwich and I never heard, for instance, of an appraiser “one can call” if the first appraisal came in low. But, obviously, there were such people and someone knew how to contact them. Silly me.
oh, my goodness, Chris, I hope you don’t think I was implying your friend was “crooked”!! I just wanted to know if s/he had knowledge or suspicions that this was occurring.
No I didn’t think that at all – I was just admitting that I really hadn’t thought this stuff was going on in Greenwich and now, it seems, it was. So I will ask my friend – my guess is that the honest appraisers were far more aware of what was going on than I was.
I think there was a spectrum of possibilities. There’s the honest at one end, and the “what do you want it to come in at” on the other. In between are the people who put in an extra 10% or 20% “cushion” (let’s face it, the banks were looking for reasons to lend as much as possible), and those who put in even more.
The Countrywide story you posted to just got me thinking that maybe appraisers just grew used to prices going up 10%-20% a year, so automatically added that much to “today’s” price.
The problem is, prices went down, and the appraisers & banks were caught flat-footed, appraising at a price that was stale (too high) a month later.
My father knew one during his divorce. My mother, exhausted with the emotional turmoil couldn’t fight anymore.
The large family home in beautiful grounds with good views was valued 30 years ago at the cost of low grade ‘semi’. My father paid my mother off, we went to live somewhere modest and my father remains in that mansion with his new family. He even has to fight developers off his property.
They were all crooked. Definately the appraiser. It’s just a friend of a friend…. The judge was probably in on it as well. I could also tell you a thing or two about his tax dodges back then when they were almost legal….