Appraisal Institute Last-minute Shakeup

[chad hampton]

What that advocacy organization could have been for working appraisers. Such a shame. If only they advocated.

 

[Non Sequitur]

Another LikedIn post from an MAI getting attention:

"I just received and read the latest President’s Message from the Appraisal Institute. It seems like they are wanting Membership to stay in total darkness about all the crap that is going on in Chicago while they paint a completely roses picture to portray that the “leadership” is actively doing things to preserve the organization and that it continues to be “the premiere appraisal organization”.

Those of us who have even the slightest knowledge of current events knows this is a complete and utter fallacy. Things are FAR from rosey or corprosetic.

So, I wrote him the following message. I seriously doubt that he will respond. But I guess we will see.

Dear President, Would you PLEASE provide the entire membership with a TRUTHFUL AND CONCISE update on the three or five ongoing lawsuits against the AI, a REAL update on the financial status including a projected year end statement, and how you are actively dealing with getting the AI back into a position to survive, move forward, and most of all CLEAN HOUSE OF ALL THE DEAD WEIGHT AND USELESS DIRECTORS, EXECUTIVES, and STAFF.

Unless you provide MEANINGFUL information, we as members simply have to assume that it is “status quo” and absolutely nothing is changing for the better and the entire organization is failing beyond belief."

 

[RCA]

Catch-22

The Appraisal Institute needs to move appraisal methods forward by an order of magnitude, from simple matched-pair analysis and OLS (ordinary linear regression) to non-parametric or partially non-parametric data mining methods such as MARS, GLR (glmnet), and GAM (mgcv), adding R, Python, HTML, Javascript, CSS and other languages, adding Mapping (GIS, QGIS, ...) including objective methods to define neighborhoods, Quarto reporting to different formats, Postgres, Sqlite, ..., and using AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Grok.

This requires a talent pool capable of learning and effectively using these tools.

Only a very small percentage of the existing pool of appraiser talent in the US has the necessary educational background and intellectual skills for learning the above tools. In fact, instructors to teach them are just as sorely lacking.

There isn't anyone to teach the required courses, and even if there were, there aren't any potential appraisal students who could learn the needed skills.

Some organizations could start the processes, but it wouldn't be popular with the membership. And even if they did, it would take many years to implement on any scale that could be considered sufficient.

So, quite frankly! The process is unlikely to succeed, especially from the perspective of appraisal organizations. The most that will be produced by any effort by them is a new generation of quacks, of which we can already see quite a number on LinkedIn - yes, that is where you will find them.

The industry will have to limp along with what it has. It will be chaotic and open to corruption in ways never before seen.

If, pray god, some company, organization or individual wants a genuinely supported valuation of a property:

1. It/he/she needs to find what can be best described as a "Valuation Engineer".
2. Valuation Engineers may simply avoid State Appraiser Licenses and offer their services as Consultants.
3. Users who need a loan will be required to find an appraiser to do their bidding for the GSEs. They may hand the Valuation Engineer's analysis to the appraiser as guidance. Slowly, but surely, the profession will adapt.

 

[RCA]

Catch-22

The Appraisal Institute needs to move appraisal methods forward by an order of magnitude, from simple matched-pair analysis and OLS (ordinary linear regression) to non-parametric or partially non-parametric data mining methods such as MARS, GLR (glmnet), and GAM (mgcv), adding R, Python, HTML, Javascript, CSS and other languages, adding Mapping (GIS, QGIS, ...) including objective methods to define neighborhoods, Quarto reporting to different formats, Postgres, Sqlite, ..., and using AI tools such as Claude, ChatGPT and Grok.

This requires a talent pool capable of learning and effectively using these tools.

Only a very small percentage of the existing pool of appraiser talent in the US has the necessary educational background and intellectual skills for learning the above tools. In fact, instructors to teach them are just as sorely lacking.

There isn't anyone to teach the required courses, and even if there were, there aren't any potential appraisal students who could learn the needed skills.

Some organizations could start the processes, but it wouldn't be popular with the membership. And even if they did, it would take many years to implement on any scale that could be considered sufficient.

So, quite frankly! The process is unlikely to succeed, especially from the perspective of appraisal organizations. The most that will be produced by any effort by them is a new generation of quacks, of which we can already see quite a number on LinkedIn - yes, that is where you will find them.

The industry will have to limp along with what it has. It will be chaotic and open to corruption in ways never before seen.

If, pray god, some company, organization or individual wants a genuinely supported valuation of a property:

1. It/he/she needs to find what can be best described as a "Valuation Engineer".
2. Valuation Engineers may simply avoid State Appraiser Licenses and offer their services as Consultants.
3. Users who need a loan will be required to find an appraiser to do their bidding for the GSEs. They may hand the Valuation Engineer's analysis to the appraiser as guidance. Slowly, but surely, the profession will adapt.

Oh, wait. Is this really a Catch 22? It is, but it needs to be slightly rephrased:

The appraisal profession faces a capability trap. The methods needed to keep valuation credible are becoming more statistical, computational, spatial, and reproducible. But the existing professional infrastructure was built around narrative reasoning, matched-pair analysis, form reporting, and relatively simple regression. To move beyond that, the profession needs instructors, curricula, software fluency, data architecture, and students capable of absorbing a much more technical discipline. At present, those resources are scarce.

The result may not be orderly modernization from within the appraisal organizations. More likely, the technical frontier will be pushed by outside analysts, consultants, assessment modelers, data scientists, and a small number of hybrid appraiser-programmers — what might be called valuation engineers. Traditional appraisers may remain necessary for regulated lending work, but the deeper analytical work may increasingly be done outside the traditional licensing structure.

So here is the Catch 22:

The profession cannot modernize without advanced talent, but it cannot attract or develop enough advanced talent until it modernizes.

 

[Zoe]

They made a royal screw up when they fired that Lady that was pushing for single family residential appraisers and separation of fees on truth in lending disclosures.

Royal screw up by firing the lady. Problem is many have their hands in appraisal management companies. A house divided against itself will fall.

At one point Appraisal Institute pushed for separation of fees on truth in lending disclosures but then so many of membership were involved with appraisal management companies that they dropped the ball and they fired a lady that was pushing for single family residential appraisers.

You can't have your cake and eat it too. Once you eat the cake, the cake is gone.

 

[chad hampton]

All AI ever had to do was state how every decision they made and ever stance they took was a benefit to their working appraiser members. And they just can’t do it.

 

[RCA]

All AI ever had to do was state how every decision they made and ever stance they took was a benefit to their working appraiser members. And they just can’t do it.

Well, you are close to the real and final solution.

This is what will happen: Applications will be created to handle all detailed and analytical work, as well as reporting. Robots will do the inspection - imagine 1 or 2 Optimus-type robots arriving at a house in a self-driving EV. An AI-Agent will manage the whole thing. A brilliant verbal report will be delivered by the AI-Agent, backed up by Logic Programming, graphs, and the verbiage. It will be as understandable as can be. Every assertion will be proven. Every available fact supplied (one way or another). Every argument will be provenly backed up by indisputable logic and math.

That is what will happen.

Yes, at some high level, there will be human monitoring and supervision. But for all practical purposes, 99% of the tasks and responsibilities involved in executing the appraisal protocols will be handled by AI and automation.

That is the New World.

And you will see this across the board, where tasks are highly complex and reliability, safety, speed, and efficiency are all important. Education, manufacturing, police, medical care, surveillance, security and on and on.

So, where does that leave us humans? It will require a lot of adaptation.

There are many follow-up questions that can be asked, such as: Where does this leave the Appraisal Institute? Does it just become a kind of legacy organization to manage a dying profession? IMO, yes, I believe so. It will, in the process, lose structure, respect, and become ever more corrupt. Where there is no hope, there is only rot. Slow, decaying rot.

 

[Zoe]

Well, you are close to the real and final solution.

This is what will happen: Applications will be created to handle all detailed and analytical work, as well as reporting. Robots will do the inspection - imagine 1 or 2 Optimus-type robots arriving at a house in a self-driving EV. An AI-Agent will manage the whole thing. A brilliant verbal report will be delivered by the AI-Agent, backed up by Logic Programming, graphs, and the verbiage. It will be as understandable as can be. Every assertion will be proven. Every available fact supplied (one way or another). Every argument will be provenly backed up by indisputable logic and math.

That is what will happen.

Yes, at some high level, there will be human monitoring and supervision. But for all practical purposes, 99% of the tasks and responsibilities involved in executing the appraisal protocols will be handled by AI and automation.

That is the New World.

And you will see this across the board, where tasks are highly complex and reliability, safety, speed, and efficiency are all important. Education, manufacturing, police, medical care, surveillance, security and on and on.

So, where does that leave us humans? It will require a lot of adaptation.

There are many follow-up questions that can be asked, such as: Where does this leave the Appraisal Institute? Does it just become a kind of legacy organization to manage a dying profession? IMO, yes, I believe so. It will, in the process, lose structure, respect, and become ever more corrupt. Where there is no hope, there is only rot. Slow, decaying rot.

Do you know complex? and your subject? and your intended use and user?

You do. I read your posts. Let me give you a complex assignment. Let's see how you do on Market value definition.

 

[djd09]

Appraisal Institute Is Being Sued By Experts In A Dying Field​

Even trade groups can fade away...​

• Since 2024, the Appraisal Institute has faced a cascade of sexual harassment, retaliation, and governance‑failure allegations, including a disclosed 2024 sexual‑harassment payout of $412,000 and multiple whistleblower suits over misreported exam results and toxic leadership culture.
• Former senior insiders have all alleged systemic misconduct: exam‑score fraud, inflated membership reporting, retaliation against those who challenged abuses, and negligent handling of harassment complaints.
• These legal actions build on a long‑running pattern of alleged self‑dealing and mismanagement in both the Appraisal Institute and The Appraisal Foundation, coinciding with a severe membership decline and intensifying fears that leadership grift is accelerating the profession’s decline just as regulators and investors move toward automated valuation models.

Major Litigation Against The Appraisal Industry’s Largest Trade Group​

The Appraisal Institute (AI) is a deeply broken trade group that has operated without real competition for years and has been rife with bad behavior, as I’ve chronicled here for years.

In 2023, I testified for 3 hours at FHFA in Washington, D.C., on C-SPAN (a bucket list item checked off!), the second in a four-part series, about the parallel corruption at The Appraisal Foundation (TAF), another appraisal organization in most appraisers’ lives. I played a role in making this hearing happen, along with several of my industry colleagues around the country. It was both satisfying and frustrating.

The Appraisal Foundation (TAF)

While not a trade group, Congress created TAF more than three decades ago, but it really needs to scrap it and start over. It has been gerry-rigged by their leadership to overstaff themselves, foster unnecessary bureaucracy, and pay themselves high salaries as compared to peers, doing a disservice to the appraisal industry by serving as the keeper of our industry’s certification language, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP). It grew to be a bureaucratic profit mill, cranking out changes to USPAP, led by the same person until recently.

My Change In Focus

After that 2023 hearing in DC, I thought about the enormous amount of time and energy I have spent trying to promote change in the appraisal industry. I love my industry colleagues around the nation who worked with me on this effort. I have enjoyed my career in appraisal in New York. But few appraisers are still entering the profession, as existing appraisers are dying off. The median age of our industry is over 60. From 2023 to 2025 alone, the Appraisal Institute saw its membership fall from 16,000 to 11,000, a 31% decline (down 74% from 42,000 in 1991). Industry-wide estimates show about 92,000 real estate appraisers (with many holding both residential and general credentials) in 2016, versus about 65,000 in June 2025, a decline of roughly 27,000 appraisers or about 30% in the last ten years

I did my best to shine a light on the AI and TAF leadership’s self-dealing, but in the end, not much had changed. So I pulled back from my efforts in the appraisal industry after the 2023 hearing and focused on other things because the industry doesn’t seem to want change badly enough. I also recently stepped down from several appraisal-related organizations because I felt it was time to focus on other things at this point in my career.

Appraisal Institute Is Being Sued By Experts In A Dying Field

Even trade groups can fade away...

housingnotes.com

 

[Non Sequitur]

Funny, none of the below was mentioned at the 2026 Annual Conference in Nashville or LDAC. In fact, just the opposite: Nothing to worry about.

Anyway, here's real news from another MAI on LinkedIn:


"Last Friday I went to my local San Diego Appraisal Institute chapter meeting.

I was surprised to meet 10 of you who knew me from Linkedin which was awesome to see.

But the bigger story from the meeting is one most appraisers outside California are not hearing yet.

Our San Diego chapter is being absorbed into the larger Southern California chapter.

The reason is simple math.

Membership at local appraisal chapters is shrinking faster than expenses are dropping.

As older appraisers age out of the industry, fewer young appraisers are stepping in to take their place.

The chapters that organize our continuing education, networking events, and local advocacy are quietly running out of money.

The most surprising part of the meeting came from outside the United States.

Appraisers who drove up from Tijuana shared that their chapter is dealing with the exact same membership drop.

This is not just a California problem.

The aging out of our profession is happening on both sides of the border, and the smaller, older chapters are feeling it first.

Two questions worth sitting with if you are in this industry:

1. Have you looked at your local chapter’s financial position recently?

2. Is your chapter strong enough to support its members another five years from now, or is consolidation the only viable path forward?

The appraisal community is small enough that we all get impacted by these conversations.

Do you think the number of appraisers in our industry will continue to drop? "