Webbed, you are right, but you're not taking it to the logical conclusion. End the fraud of licensing altogether. It is a costly dismal failure which has not contributed one whit towards prevention of the kinds of abuses it was supposed to.
It would be difficult to displace the bureaucracy that has lodged itself into the process, but not impossible. It has to be made clear how much better the elimination of licensing would make things for all aspects of this business. Costs would come down across the board, clients would have to make their own determination of competency, and the Appraisal Foundation could be dissolved.
I wouldn't think any appraiser would be naive enough to think that our financial services sector is a free market or that there's any way our society would seriously consider going back to allowing the client's judgment to be the sole determinant of who is and isn't qualified to perform appraisals. Right or wrong, the government is heavily involved in many modes of commerce and law that use appraisals and the taxpayers have an interest to protect that's separate and apart from those of the direct participants in the transactions.
The whole reason we have licensing is because previously there wasn't a single standard of practice or a minimum set of qualification criteria or any way to effectively hold an appraiser accountable to the public's interest. The professional organizations had a shot at doing that but they failed miserably by not enforcing their own codes of conduct among their membership. As far as I can tell they're still not doing much to discipline their members. They sure haven't earned the respect of most appraisers.
The cat's out of the bag, now. It ain't going back in any time soon. This cycle is leading to more licensing of more types of workers in the finance-related occupations, not less.
People look around at the results of licensing and say it's failed miserably. I don't think anyone would argue the fact that there's a lot of room for improvement. But the people who think it would have been better without licensing and compare the present setup to the local banker-local appraiser model that previously prevailed have not taken into consideration the fact that the local banker doesn't limit their activities to local opportunities anymore. Over time, the term "banker" has devolved to include unregulated parolees and drug addicts and gang members working out of boilerrooms.
We don't live in Mayberry any more, and appraiser licensing has absolutely nothing to do with that evolution.
If you want to know what the appraisal business would have looked like in 2005 without licensing all you have to do is look at what the loan origination business looked like in 2005. That's what it looks like when the client is king and the customer is always right.
The fact that the feds forced an unfunded mandate on the states and that none of the state boards are adequately funded or motivated to run a program that can handle the number of complaints they receive in a timely manner should not be considered indicative of a poorly designed system that cannot function. It should be considered indicative of a society that isn't sufficiently motivated to support those boards in fulfilling their duties.
Citing the abuses and saying the appraisal licensing system can never work is like citing the number of speeders on a highway and saying speed limits can never work. First off, those speed laws do work to the extent that most people choose to adhere to a go-with-the-flow interpretation of those speed laws. Compared to having no speed laws at all, simply having them on the books and minimally enforcing them brings some semblance of order on the highways. If not for those laws we'd be seeing a lot more 140mph speed runs everyday because there wouldn't be any reason not to.
Beyond that, everyone knows those speed laws can work to create a "flow" that's no faster that the speed limit. They know those laws can work because they've seen them work during those periods when the state troopers go on a zero tolerance program and ticket everyone they catch. The difference between seeing the maximum effect of these speed limits vs the "voluntary" effect that naturally occurs among the public comes down to enforcement; more specifically, giving the cops the support it takes for them to crack down. The average cop has no problem with working a zero tolerance program when they have the resources and the mandate to do so. So it would be with the state boards if they had access to that level of resources.
While we're at it, appraisers don't have a problem with doing what they're supposed to do when they have the support to do so, either.
