Earth

[Meandering]

Dragging in the word "racial " into threads which have nothing to do with the topic makes this board cringe worthy and an embarrassment, being that the public can log on and read it.

Allegations of Appraiser racism

https://www.yahoo.com/news/home-appraisal-black-couple-skyrockets-160543526.html Of course, in a short article like that, the case is presented as cut-and/dried. We think there must be more to the story.

appraisersforum.com

 

[KYLECODY]

Eh?

 

[RCA]

I saw a study where the author carefully selected homes with very few differences and concluded that there was a 10% variation that was typical noise in the market. I'm more suspect when I see reports where all the sales are adjusted to leave almost no explained difference, particularly out here in the wild west where "typical" describes groups of 1.

Nowadays, the explanation for the differences gets to be rather complex. When I unfold my sales grid, it's really, I think, almost like a work of art, music. You have the flows going back an forth. If you just look at the resulting value of the subject, it may look unreasonable until you unwind the adjustments to get an understanding. Believe me, you are adjusting a smaller house up in value because prices have increased over the past year, then also up in value because it is smaller, then down because of this, up because of that, down because of something else, up for something else. Believe me, the method I use works great. But I do not see how anyone could do this manually in a convincing manner. You have to do this in a very precise and objective way. ....

 

[RCA]

And I'm thinking I will put the program and code out on GitHub as open source, with the book. If other "valuation engineers" want to contribute they can if they are experienced programmers in C#. This version will probably only integrate with R earth for now.

I need some more time to make the program more useable to the general public. It will input Excel/CSV spreadsheets, output an Excel Adjustment Grid and Sales Grid with the models and so on. The code will use the DevExpress library. So, if you want to contribute you will have to buy a license for that. I will put the Windows (and maybe Linux) binary out on GitHub for appraisers to use under some kind of license. You will have to manually transfer the adjustments to your appraisal software.

Let you know.