That's the rub. You got folks in central offices looking at appraisals from all over the place trying to figure out what's good and what's BS. Don't like it? Get a review! Ok so now is the review any better? F it lets out source to an AMC. Ok so now is this AMC's reviewer's any more knowledgeable than the bank's guy? Instead of 1,000 miles aways he's 500 miles? None of these people can do more than cursory reviews as they aren't locally competent to do anything else. The system sucks but you have to work within it so what do you do? Step one is to fact check everything you can. Errors of fact are a giant red flag. You report R-1 Residential for zoning and the municipality has no such classification you are hereby removed. Screw up the easy stuff and I have no faith on the difficult.
Having read the Cookie Man all these years I have some sense of the wry and lucid style of his replies. I think Scotty sums up a whole lot of the issues in this business. And my take away, misreading him or not, is this:
A - An apparently reasonable value can be assigned with a minimum of information.
B - The trigger for a review is usually a factual error, not a value
C - The (administrative) review can spot the factual errors but is uncertain as to the value errors
D - The (technical) reviewer, picked by the same system as the appraiser, is likely to conclude the same thing for a lack of actual local knowledge. Thus, the review is oft meaningless
E - Eliminate the obvious flawed appraiser who makes basic factual mistakes (zoning, etc.) and use only those who, at least, are factually accurate.
F - Doing this winnows the crowd down to basically a local experienced and conscientious appraiser.
My final conclusion is that the value - seemingly the gist of the whole appraisal - is rarely as "accurate" as we think. The range of value is often much wider than we normally admit or accept. Therein lies the rub. On some properties a dart board has the same accuracy.
