Esteemed, Honorable Counselor JGrant: The need to conduct due diligence does not need to be proffered. Seems like each time I post in an attempt to test the proverbial waters-of-thought, underlying factors inherent in the concept are brandied without furthering the scope of the discourse. The most salient issue concerning data points that do not represent--in this case, "the market"--and that consequently, with support from academia, are excluded from the analysis, is whether to spell the plural as "outliers" or "outlyers." That having been said, and with consideration for the obligatory caveat that "markets are imperfect," they rarely are, a tangible rationale almost inevitably existing to explain extraordinary deviations from the mean, given sufficient resources, e.g., due diligence conducted to determine the source of variance. It isn't as though one would include pending listings in the SCA grid that reflect current market activity, and subsequently remove them if they fail to support the adjusted value range established by closed sales. Rather, the appraiser would note that pending sales included in the grid as the best reflection of market reaction, based presumably on contract dates more recent than those that correspond with the closed sales, or that they do not appear to support that range, but that if not, a sufficient sample of data does not exist to enable the appraiser to opine the potentially dramatic change in market direction--although a change in a market that's appreciated as much so as local sub-markets most everywhere normally would be relatively dramatic, even if the trend reflects a normal movement to regress towards that mean of a long-term positive market best defined as the flip reversal to the systemic decline in its midst a decade ago--that because the "as is" basis of most assignments precludes the appraiser's wherewithal to opine prospectively. But all that drivel is implied. Rather, I would ask whether one might logically extrapolate USPAP rationale as it applies to the appraiser's liberty to use pending sales in a retrospective assignment to the fact that he or she is required to do so, in an "as is" contemporaneous assignment, based on common law precedent as it would be if the appraisal profession was more fastidious.
