Appraisal Institute Last-minute Shakeup

[Non Sequitur]

This is the LinkedIn post referenced above (bolding mine):


"It’s election time again at The Appraisal Institute. This year we have two candidates running for Vice President, the role that segues into becoming the President. This is a “volunteer” role which comes with a lot of political power. The President ultimately makes appointments to committees, decides who gets lucrative teaching and education contracts, and at the end of their tenure, presides over the National Nominating Committee (NNC).

The NNC is a 10-person committee that determines who “wins” the election for VP. The members of The AI do not get to vote directly for a candidate.

In past years, you could see who were the members of the NNC. There was a process where you could write letters in support for your candidate which I always believed were given directly to the NNC. You hoped that the NNC would consider the number and quality of the letters written.

This year, The AI has removed the names of the NNC from their webpage. Also, I have been told that all the letters written are shunted though a process where the in-house counsel of The AI gets to read and censor the letters as they see fit. And who knows if the letters are actually being sent to the NNC? No way to call anyone on the committee to double check.

If you were going to control the outcome of a process, I can think of no better way to do it. And if you are completely disgusted, stay tuned. In my next column, I’m going to talk about the dirtiest secret of all at The AI, The Audit Committee."

 

[Non Sequitur]

 

[RCA]

The Appraisal Institute's Self-Inflicted Trap

Well, well. The AI has a serious problem — one decades in the making from keeping their heads in the sand. Now they're starting to realize it.

1. The Appraisal Journal

The flagship journal of a professional organization signals that organization's intellectual credibility. I heard derogatory comments about The Appraisal Journal as far back as 2004, from a well-known Chief Appraiser and USPAP Instructor in San Jose I worked under doing commercial appraisals. His view: the journals from the 1960s and 70s were substantially better. My own assessment of most technical articles published since then — written by the usual parade of Ph.D.s — is that they were largely unoriginal and technically weak.

The AI apparently knows this too. Their review panel now lists 47 members, and I'm noticing more with mathematics backgrounds — which is encouraging, at least in principle. A random sampling wasn't particularly impressive, with perhaps two or three exceptions. The pattern is telling: reviewers affiliated with top-tier universities typically lack strong technical credentials in mathematics, while those holding Ph.D.s in math tend to come from lower-ranked departments with weaker programs. More critically, I see no evidence of real data mining experience among them. They appear to be heading in the right direction — but slowly, and from a low baseline.

2. Amorín's Recent Articles

Amorín's last two articles break the pattern — one publishes R code, the next discusses Network Theory. That's notable. But as far as I can determine, he hasn't actually applied these methods in real appraisals himself, which used to be a prerequisite: articles were expected to discuss methods tested in actual practice. That standard appears to have been quietly dropped.

The R article focuses on Bayesian inference — which is arguably a poor fit for most appraisal work, appropriate only in rare circumstances. The Network Theory piece is more interesting but overstates the case: business location is primarily driven by zoning, property availability, and price. Network Theory has real but limited applicability — perhaps 15–20% explanatory weight on property prices in cases where traffic corridors and locational choice actually matter. Still, both articles point in a better direction. The real challenge will be finding appraisers with genuine hands-on experience using advanced methods. That may prove harder than it sounds.

Conclusion

Some people at the AI clearly understand what needs to change and are making a genuine attempt. The risk is that less technically-oriented members — likely the majority — may not welcome this new direction once they notice it. The AI is caught in a trap of their own making. Whether they can climb out is an open question.