Appraiser who undervalued a Black and Latino couple’s Oakland home must pay them $75K
By
Bob Egelko,Courts ReporterApril 14, 2025
A Black and Latino couple in Oakland will receive $75,000 to compensate them for a property appraisal that undervalued their home by more than $250,000, state civil rights officials said Monday.
Jessica Christian/The Chronicle
A Black and Latino couple in Oakland will receive $75,000 to compensate them for a property appraisal that undervalued their home by more than $250,000, which prevented them from getting a new loan and eventually led them to move out, state civil rights officials said Monday.
The settlement of a complaint by the California Civil Rights Department also requires the appraisal company, Clear Capital, to train employees on identifying and preventing possible racial and ethnic bias in assessing property value.
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“Whether it’s lowball appraisals or a history of redlining, communities of color across the country continue to confront the multigenerational harms of housing discrimination,” the department’s director, Kevin Kish, said in a statement announcing the settlement. “Appraisers, lenders and brokers all have a responsibility to prevent discrimination in real estate transactions.”
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Clear Capital did not respond to a request for comment. The company, based in Reno,
describes itself as one of the nation’s top five appraisal managers.
In a related settlement, the Civil Rights Department said the individual assessor, who was not identified by name, had agreed to pay $75,000 to the couple and $15,000 to the department, undergo anti-discrimination training and watch an ABC documentary, “Our America: Lowballed,” on the effects of appraisal bias on communities of color.
This is not the only case of its kind. In 2023, a Black couple in Marin City
settled their case against another company Miller and Perotti Real Estate Appraisers, who assessed their home at $995,000 in 2020.
A few weeks later, when a white friend of the couple posed as the owner, an appraiser from another company assessed the same property at $1,482,500. The couple, Paul Austin and Tenisha Tate-Austin, said the under-appraisal made it harder for them to obtain refinancing for home improvements at a time of low interest rates, the same problem cited by the couple in the Oakland case.
In the Oakland case, the Civil Rights Department said it received a complaint in 2022 from the nonprofit Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California that the Black and Latino couple had received an appraisal from Clear Capital that was $254,000 less than another assessor had valued the same home eight months earlier.
When the couple then tried to refinance their home under the declining interest rates, the lender turned them down, and they decided they had to leave — selling the home, nine months later, for $300,000 more than the previous assessment, the Civil Rights Department said.
The department declined to identify the couple. “We generally withhold the names of individual complainants to protect their privacy,” said Rishi Khalsa, a spokesperson for the department.
Reach Bob Egelko:
begelko@sfchronicle.com.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/oakland-appraisal-settlement-20275834.php
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