Survey: 91 Percent Of Real Estate Appraisers Asked To Inflate Home Values
Here’s some disturbing information related to U.S. home prices that I came across this past Sunday. The Chicago Tribune’s Mary Umberger wrote:
When economic historians begin their postmortems on the housing bubble, they’ll zero in on nuggets such as:
A vast majority (91 percent) of real-estate appraisers say they’ve been asked to inflate the value of a home, according to ValuFinders Inc., a California firm that provides software for the housing industry.
The ValuFinders survey also reported that 81 percent of appraisers said they feared losing repeat business if they didn’t provide valuations in line with those from the requester.
Question is, how many appraisers actually followed through on these requests?
Source:
“Assessing the wages of a downturn”
Mary Umberger
Chicago Tribune, June 1, 2008
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