by Calculated Risk on 7/13/2009 08:00:00 PM

There have been quite a few complaints about the new appraisal rules from real estate agents, homebuilders and mortgage brokers.

Last Friday Freddie Mac updated their appraisal guidelines and clarified that the appraiser is not required to use distressed sales (REOs, short sales):

The appraiser’s selection of comparable sales is crucial to providing an accurate opinion of value based on market data. With respect to comparable sales, the appraiser must choose appropriate comparable sales, and certify that the comparable sales chosen are those most similar to the subject property. In underwriting the appraisal, the underwriter must consider whether any adjustments are supported and are reasonable. The amount and number of any adjustments must also be considered. Typically, the higher the amount of the adjustments or the number of adjustments the more likely the comparable sales might not be representative of the subject property. Freddie Mac does not have requirements about what comparable sales the appraiser is to use. For example, we do not require appraisers to use Real Estate Owned (REO), foreclosure or short sales. However, if the appraiser determines that these are representative of the properties available to typical purchasers for the market in which the property is located, appraisers must consider their use.

My favorite paragraph in the bulletin is:

To determine that a Mortgage is eligible for sale to Freddie Mac, a Seller/Servicer must conclude that the Borrower is creditworthy (acceptable credit reputation and capacity) and the Mortgaged Premises (collateral) are adequate for the transaction. Credit reputation, capacity and collateral are often called the “three Cs” of underwriting; if one of these components is not acceptable or if there is excessive layering of risk across components, the Mortgage is not eligible for sale to Freddie Mac. Sellers must accurately evaluate and determine a Borrower’s ability to repay the Mortgage.

Imagine that.

Weekly Schedule

by Calculated Risk on 6/24/2009 04:12:00 PM

Much is being written about the complaints of the NAR (Realtors) and the NAHB (Builders) concerning the Home Valuation Code of Conduct. And the response from the Appraisal Institute.

From Lawrence Yun, NAR chief economist:

"[T]he increase in sales is less than expected because poor appraisals are stalling transactions. Pending home sales indicated much stronger activity, but some contracts are falling through from faulty valuations that keep buyers from getting a loan.”
emphasis added

From Joe Robson, chairman of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB):

“In the midst of the prime home buying season, builders report that a number of factors are limiting new-home sales. These include consumer concerns about job security, potential buyers’ inability to sell their existing homes, and problems with appraisals coming in too low. The latter issue is directly related to the use of distressed properties (foreclosures and short sales) as comps, which disproportionately impacts assessed values of nearby homes.”

This change started when NY Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo sued First American for conspiring with WaMu to inflate real estate appraisals back in November 2007.

“The independence of the appraiser is essential to maintaining the integrity of the mortgage industry. First American and eAppraiseIT violated that independence when Washington Mutual strong-armed them into a system designed to rip off homeowners and investors alike,” said Attorney General Cuomo. “The blatant actions of First American and eAppraiseIT have contributed to the growing foreclosure crisis and turmoil in the housing market. By allowing Washington Mutual to hand-pick appraisers who inflated values, First American helped set the current mortgage crisis in motion.”

The email evidence was pretty damning. And the HVCC was part of the settlement.

This has been coming for some time, and should be no surprise.

For a good background on the appraisal process, see Tanta's What's Wrong With Approved Appraiser Lists. Tanta was writing about approved appraiser lists, but her posts explains the appraisal problem. Here is an excerpt:

[W]hat WaMu is alleged to have done is itself the kind of conduct that is an automatic “red flag” for anyone who knows anything about how the appraisal management business works. Since most of you are fortunate enough to be entirely innocent of that, I thought I’d go through some issues here.

First off, I’m talking about how the business works, not about how the principles of appraiser independence are derived by the Appraisal Foundation or why they matter so much. I’m taking as a given that we accept the axiom that when an appraiser’s compensation is based on his or her willingness to come up with the answer an interested party wants, instead of the answer he or she thinks the facts of the subject property, the transaction requested, and the local real estate market warrant, an appraisal is nothing more than a ratification of the loan amount someone has already decided on, and that “someone” isn’t the ultimate bagholder. The real bagholder wants to know whether it is lending too much or risking owning an unsalable piece of REO. That an individual loan officer or broker just wants to know how high we can make the loan amount—and thus a commission—is an artifact of a business structure in which a lender’s own employees or agents are not aligned with its own corporate best interests. At some level the appraisal problem will never get solved until the compensation of loan processing employees and intermediaries gets solved, but that’s not today’s argument.

In the olden days of local lenders, you had either staff appraisers or “fee appraisers.” You could actually have appraisers on your payroll because you lent in a defined local area: you didn’t have to worry about needing an appraisal for a property six states away that your staff appraisers couldn’t get to, even if they were licensed in that state. If you relied on fee appraisers, possibly because it was too expensive to keep appraisers on the payroll during down-cycles in RE, you still worked in a local market, you got to know all of them, and you could order appraisals from people whose work was familiar. If you were smart, you worked with the best appraisers there were. If you were stupid, you channeled business to your golf buddies. A number of S&Ls did the latter, and they did not live happily ever after. We have this thing called FIRREA, which brought into being USPAP, in large part because of that second option.

Once local lenders became regional lenders and then national lenders, the distance between corporate headquarters, the Appraisal Department, and the actual properties and markets grew to the point that having staff appraisers was impractical and hiring fee appraisers was a crap-shoot. You can pick up the Yellow Pages to find an appraiser in a market you just entered, but this means you will learn by doing in terms of quality. That goes double if you entered this market via wholesale lending: you now have a broker you don’t know much about hiring an appraiser you don’t know anything about in an RE market you’ve never done business in before.

The early years of national wholesale lending supplied lots of excitement, as Podunk National Bank changed its name to Ubiquitous, Inc. and charged into market areas about which it knew nothing, on the assumption that, say, Miami is just like Podunk except the loan amounts are bigger. Sometimes this was actually retail lending: Ubiquitous, Inc. started buying up branches in all these new and exciting markets, with the plan of managing them long-distance from corporate headquarters. Often those branches (complete with their employees) could be acquired for amazingly cheap sums of money. The Lender Formerly Known As Podunk often didn’t ask itself why the current owner of that branch wanted out so badly, but that’s hardly a problem unique to mortgage lending or banking.

Eventually, everyone had to deal with the hard knocks. You might be able to justify taking risks on the unknown when you move into a new market, but you still have to do something about the problems that crop up. Everyone got at least some really bad appraisals from the Yellow Pages approach, and had to start making some lists. I really think that a major problem lurking in the industry happened right here, when wholesalers and correspondent lenders made a decision about what kind of list to make. Do you make an “Approved Appraiser” list of the ones you haven’t had problems with, or do you make an “Excluded Appraiser” list of the ones you have had problems with?

There is no question that logically, the most efficient thing to do is make the exclusion list. Even if you believe that there are more than just a few bad apples, you don’t get into the national mortgage lending business if you believe that bad appraisers outnumber good appraisers by a wide margin. Exclusionary lists are just shorter and easier to administrate.

If you’re still a retail lender (just a long-distance one), you can keep the shorter exclusionary list internal to your own organization. The major disadvantage of exclusionary lists developed for the wholesale and correspondent lenders, and for any lender in the “originate and sell” rather than “originate and hold” business. If you are contracting with brokers, correspondent lenders, third-party investors and servicers and other folks who need to conduct due diligence on your loans, you end up having to make your list available to all those parties. It becomes nearly impossible to keep it confidential.

And that started the defamation fear. Too many lenders faced real or imagined threats of lawsuits from appraisers who did not want their names appearing on what had basically become a public hall of shame list. (I hasten to add that these things were not “public” to you, the consumer. They were an open secret to everyone in the business except the consumer.) So even though an approved appraiser list was a much more expensive, time-consuming, cumbersome way to get there, more and more big operations started keeping one. (Why not go to the regulators and beg for a "safe harbor" against defamation liability for exclusion lists? Because lenders are almost never long-sighted enough to ask for regulation that benefits them. They're too afraid that it always comes with the wrong strings attached. Then after the criminal probes and class actions and general shirt-losing, we look back wistfully on those strings we were so afraid of, wondering why we didn't snap that deal right up.)

The HVCC is addressing a very real and widespread appraisal problem. That doesn't mean the solution is perfect - and this shows once again that incentives matter.

An appraiser who is paid only if the loan is made, and is given the target number in advance, has a perverse incentive to "hit the number". However an appraiser that is paid no matter what, possibly has an incentive to be overly conservative and deliver a low ball appraisal that the NAR and NAHB and others are complaining about.

However lenders are still in the business of making loans (hopefully loans that will be repaid) - and the appraisers work for the lenders - and the lenders don't make money if the loan isn't made. So there is still an incentive to get deals done.

by Tanta on 7/30/2008 10:04:00 AM

If you haven't yet had a chance to read this article by John Gittelsohn in the Orange County Register about a real estate sale that was financed by Wells Fargo in January of this year, please do so now. And if you were, like most people, working on the assumption that lenders and other industry participants had at least cleaned up their acts in time for the 2008 mortgage vintage to be worth something, think again.

There isn't any significant fact about this transaction I can identify that isn't a red flag. A home in a foreclosure-wracked neighborhood was purchased at foreclosure auction in October of 2007 for $304,500, just over half what the defaulted buyer had paid in 2006. In January of 2008, the house was flipped to a non-English-speaking couple for an apparent sales price of $625,000 after some "sprucing up" by the property seller.

Ridiculous? Sure. It turns out that the seller provided the $125,000 down payment, and also executed an "addendum" to the sales contract agreeing to pay the buyers $30,000 in cash, cover the borrowers' first three mortgage payments, and toss in a 52-inch TV. Subtract out all that, and the true sales price of the property was $460,000. But apparently nobody did subtract out any of that, because Wells Fargo made a $500,000 loan to these buyers to purchase this property.

The OC Register reporter, bless his heart, tracked down the various parties who had their hands in this transaction, and got the following comments:

From the mortgage broker who put the deal together: "Whatever agreement the buyer and seller made, it was between them."

From the appraiser who dutifully came up with a value of $625,000: "Like Sanchez, she had no knowledge of the terms of the sale."

From the escrow agent who closed this loan: "It sounds to me like the seller helped out," she said. "If someone gave them $125,000, what's the problem? That's a beautiful thing, if you ask me."

From Wells Fargo: "In many instances, borrowers are able to use gifts from family members or friends for a portion of their down payment, provided the amount and source of the gifts are documented."

Excellent point, Wells Fargo. Too bad in this case the down payment didn't come from friends or family members and wasn't documented. Too bad that the broker who originated the loan seems to think the details of the purchase contract aren't any of his business. Too bad your escrow agent doesn't care where the down payment money came from, either. Too bad your appraiser has apparently never heard of the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice, to which she is obligated to conform if she wants to do appraisals for Wells Fargo, that say she is required to inquire into "the terms of the sale."

I don't think the real issue with this story is the problem of whether or not to use foreclosure or "distressed" sales as comparables in an appraisal report. The problem is that there are no comparable sales of any kind that are a reliable measure of market value if they all involved transactions in which nobody ever actually bothered to verify and analyze the terms of the sale.

If this is the level of elementary due diligence we can expect after the most atrocious mortgage blowup in history, what will it take to scare people into doing their jobs?

by Tanta on 7/25/2008 03:25:00 PM

A very interesting post today at The Big Picture.

Hopefully this means the FDIC will be monitoring Barry more closely and I can get some sleep.

by Tanta on 5/28/2008 08:18:00 AM

As a general rule I do not recommend reading "Realty Times" at 6:00 a.m., but I'm blaming twist.

It's not that people don't want homes, it's that they can't buy them under the stricter lending standards. . . .

Lenders are turning the clock back to 1975, requiring larger downpayments and higher credit scores to qualify for low interest rates. That's only prudent, but what they're also doing is tightening appraisals on properties that are being sold or refinanced.

In 1975, it was not unknown--it was in fact only made illegal that year by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act--to inquire about a married woman's future childbearing plans, her use of contraception, and her religion before deciding whether to "count" any income she might produce for purposes of qualifying for a loan. (If she said "Catholic," forget it.) If you think we are experiencing 1975 mortgage loan underwriting, you were born yesterday.

So why is it "prudent" to require larger downpayments and higher credit scores, but another thing entirely to tighten up on appraisals? And how is this nefarious appraisal tightening preventing people from buying homes?

*****************

There must be an anecdote, and we actually get a twofer:

Dallas Realtor Mary O'Keefe was hit with the new lending realities in a double whammy just this week.

"I had a closing that was delayed because the lender wanted a second appraisal," says Mary O'Keefe, a Dallas broker. "I told my clients absolutely no way would they pay for a second appraisal."

That deal finally closed, but O'Keefe lost another. A client wanted to take out some equity on her townhome, buy another property to live in, and save the townhome for mailbox money. The client had an 800-plus credit score, was approved by a lender, but went to her personal banker for the HELOC. She had an appraisal from the year before for $467,000 giving her about $155,000 in equity.

Because banks want to use appraisals no less than six months old, the personal banker called for a drive-by appraisal, which came in at $400,000, more than $20,000 below the lowest priced home in the community, and $75,000 below a home that sold a year ago three doors down.

So the purchase transaction actually did close, although it was--gasp!--"delayed," but this poor lady who wanted to cash out the "equity" in a townhome she was not going to occupy was stymied by some evil bank who--get this--wouldn't use a year-old appraisal. Turn on the disco ball and haul out your lava lamps! It's the seventies!

I confess to being somewhat alarmed, by the way, about a Realtor who tells a buyer that "no way" are they going to pay for a second appraisal. You would not, in the current environment, even consider paying another $350-$400 to assure yourself that you are not overpaying for your property by thousands of dollars?

The real problem here is that Realty Times wants to continue to perpetrate the view that establishing reliable appraised values is not in a homebuyer's best interest as well as a lender's. For some reason this reminded me of a story we posted just a year ago, in which the Wall Street Journal waxed outraged about some poor rich doctor who was having trouble getting his loan approved to buy a property for $1.05 million when the lender had gotten a broker price opinion stating that it was only worth $750,000. I did a bit of looking in the county real estate records, and it appears that our man did indeed buy the home on April 17, 2007 for $1.05 million. On April 27, 2007, the county assessed the property for tax purposes at $793,400. Per the WSJ he borrowed $885,000. I wonder if he still feels ripped off by the lender who told him he was overpaying for that home.

OK, I'm game. How?

by Calculated Risk on 3/03/2008 11:38:00 AM

From OFHEO: OFHEO, NY Attorney General, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac Sign Agreements to Combat Appraisal Fraud

There are many significant provisions in the agreements that are designed to strengthen the independence of appraisers, including eliminating broker-ordered appraisals, prohibiting appraiser coercion, and reducing the use of appraisals prepared in-house or through captive appraisal management companies in underwriting mortgages. The agreements also enhance quality control in the appraisal process and establish a complaint hotline for consumers. The agreements include a Home Valuation Code of Conduct that the Enterprises will apply to lenders selling mortgages to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. The Code becomes effective on January 1, 2009.

The parties also agreed to establish and the Enterprises fund an Independent Valuation Protection Institute designed to supplement current efforts to provide an appraisal complaint process, mediation of appraisal disputes, and mortgage fraud reporting.

Tanta had some commentary last week: Fannie Mae New Rules for Appraisals

by Tanta on 2/28/2008 08:17:00 AM

To refresh memories: Last fall, New York AG Andrew Cuomo sued an outfit called eAppraiseIt and its parent company, First American, for conspiring with WaMu to pressure appraisers to produce inflated appraised values. WaMu was not part of the suit, since for legal reasons state AGs can't sue federally-chartered thrifts in state court. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were not being sued either, but they were quickly served with subpoenas for documentation involving inflated appraisals on loans they may have purchased. The GSEs quickly agreed to appoint independent examiners to review appraisal practices, with the direct threat that lenders would be forced to buy back loans that failed to meet existing GSE rules.

It appears that Fannie Mae has finished or nearly finished its review, and is about to ruin several very large aggregators' and thousands of pissant brokers' day with a new set of rules regarding how appraisals can be obtained and what affiliations between lender and appraiser are acceptable:

Feb. 27 (Bloomberg) -- Fannie Mae, the biggest source of financing for U.S. home loans, told lenders it will probably ban their use of appraisals by in-house employees or those arranged by brokers.

Fannie Mae distributed the proposal, a response to New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's yearlong mortgage probe, to lenders in a ``talking points'' memo this week, according to a person familiar with the document. The memo was published on American Banker's Web site yesterday.

``It would be a monumental change because it would require a shift in the way that the lending industry does business,'' said Jonathan Miller, chief executive officer of Manhattan-based appraisal company Miller Samuel Inc. and a longtime proponent of creating a firewall between residential appraisers and mortgage originators. ``I think it would be tremendous.'' . . .

``Fannie Mae wishes to cooperate with the New York AG's investigation and, as part of a cooperation agreement, will likely agree to a number of items,'' according to the memo.

The proposed changes include banning Fannie Mae's partners from using appraisers employed by their wholly owned subsidiaries. Mortgage lenders that own appraisal companies include Countrywide Financial Corp., the nation's largest home- loan originator.

The restrictions would apply to loans acquired after Sept. 1, according to the memo. Fannie also told lenders that an independent appraisal clearinghouse likely would be established.

`Laughable' Practice

About three quarters of residential mortgage appraisals are arranged through brokers who only get paid if a loan closes, Miller said today in a phone interview. He called the practice ``laughable'' because it creates a financial incentive for mortgage brokers to push appraisers toward higher valuations. Higher appraisals also mean more homeowners qualify to refinance their homes and take cash out, he said. . . .

Cuomo spokesman Jeffrey Lerner said today in an e-mail that that Cuomo, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac hadn't reached an agreement.

``We have had ongoing discussions for several months,'' Lerner said. ``At the end of the process, we will either have agreements or we will take other appropriate action.''

Cuomo prefers to pursue cooperative resolutions before litigating, Lerner said.

``We are continuing our discussions and we are making progress,'' said Corinne Russell, spokeswoman for the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which oversees Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. . . .

Freddie Mac hasn't sent any memo similar to Fannie Mae's, said company spokeswoman Sharon McHale.

``We are cooperating fully with the attorney general's investigation, but at this point it would be premature to speculate as to what the outcome will be,'' McHale said.

Countrywide spokeswoman Ginny Zoraster declined to comment on Fannie Mae's proposals.

``The company does not believe this case has merit and expects to present a vigorous defense,'' Zoraster said in an e- mailed statement.

My observations:

1. So much for "synergy." I only hope that if this puts a stop to large lenders buying appraisal firms (and destroying appraiser independence), we can next move on to large lenders buying title companies (and destroying escrow officer independence).

2. Insofar as brokering of mortgages is going to survive this bust--and the indications are that any bank with a shred of sense right now is shutting down its wholesale division--they will go back to being application-takers, for which they will earn a modest fee. They will have a hard time maintaining their current pose of a "full-service lender" by also processing loans--including ordering appraisals, selecting a closing agent, etc.--which are a huge source of fees collected from consumers and which tend to give consumers the (false) impression that brokers are actually lenders.

What has been going on for some time now is that the massive failures in the wholesale model have forced the wholesale lenders to, in essence, redundantly process these loans, as everything the broker does has to be checked and rechecked and in some cases simply repeated. (You let brokers order appraisals, and once you get it, you order a second appraisal or field review appraisal or run an AVM in order to reality-check the appraisal you got. The process pretty much ceases to be efficient here.) If the GSEs just come out and force wholesalers to take control of the appraisal process from the very beginning, then the kabuki ends and we stop pretending that brokers are doing anything except bringing in a consumer willing to sign an application. The rest of the loan processing is turned over to the wholesaler.

3. An "independent appraisal clearinghouse" would, presumably, be intended to remove some of the problems I discussed in this post with individual lenders managing approved or excluded appraisal lists. Without details I can't really say what they're doing here, but it sounds like Fannie and Freddie are seriously considering getting into approving or excluding individual appraisers or appraisal firms. FHA has always done that in some fashion or another; the GSEs never have. That's a very substantial change to the way the GSEs do business with lenders.

by Tanta on 11/13/2007 08:43:00 AM

Countrywide's October operations numbers are out. You can see the score here.

The financial press will report on the headline numbers (loan production down year over year, no kidding!). I confess that this little thing down in "Loan Closing Services" caught my eye: AVM (automated valuation of a mortgaged property) services for October: 5,793,171 units. For context purposes, CFC's entire $1.4 trillion servicing portfolio is 8,999,292 units. AVM volume for October 2006 was 539,126 units, and was only 6,743,360 units for the first three quarters of 2006. This is reported under "loan closing services," but quite obviously not all these AVMs are being run for newly closed or closing loans.

So, is CFC running AVMs on everything it owns and showing those as "production" of its loan closing services division? Or, is CFC selling AVM services to some other big portfolio?

Why should anyone care? I don't know . . . there's been some stuff in the news lately about lawsuits and inflated appraisals . . . I'd sure love to know whether somebody is busy getting a AVM on every loan it's exposed to . . .