The Brilliance of CU

[pp715]

I complete a report for your average AMC. Two weeks later I get a request from the AMC to consider three sales that CU has determined would be better. Oh, and CU says my report has a score of 2.5 (whatever that means). So I run two of the CU's as comparables (they are year old sales, whereas my sales were less than 3-months).

AMC gives me a big thank you.....raised the CU score to 4. I recently had a conversation with a 'review' type who said that CU knows everything, that Fannie knows about every sale. I had to disagree, since my experience is that CU relies on old sales. Reviewer-type says, 'they know about every sale.' My response was, so how do they know about the sales where they don't require appraisals, since that is common in the current market according to Realtors, or they aren't financed with Fannie?

I have wondered since we're entering into the New, Better, Private Fannie, capitalized as an IPO, using real money and real risk, if they aren't in "operation clean up balance sheet" so they can get that big opening day bounce on Wall Street when they ring the bell. Just a thought.

Good morning. I would just like to reply kindly to your comments. The lower the CU score, the better FNMA "feels" your appraisal is. Their guidelines indicate that the reviewer does not even need to go back to the appraiser if the score is under 4.0. Im shaking my head as to why someone came back to you with a report of a score of 2.5.

 

[J Grant]

Good morning. I would just like to reply kindly to your comments. The lower the CU score, the better FNMA "feels" your appraisal is. Their guidelines indicate that the reviewer does not even need to go back to the appraiser if the score is under 4.0. Im shaking my head as to why someone came back to you with a report of a score of 2.5.

CU can return a low score not because there is something"wrong" with an appraisal, but because the appraisal sets off red flags to their score system ( very large adjustments, big price spread between comps etc ) Though the appraisal might be flawed as well, but it can also simply reflect a complex appraisal with comps/adjustments exceeding Fannie's guidelines

 

[Tom D]

I complete a report for your average AMC. Two weeks later I get a request from the AMC to consider three sales that CU has determined would be better. Oh, and CU says my report has a score of 2.5 (whatever that means). AMC gives me a big thank you.....raised the CU score to 4.

did you get you scores reversed? a score of 2.5 is pretty good, most lenders will accept that, or lower, no matter what CU red flags . i don't think anyone can get a '1' score. the scores run from 1-5 with 4,5 being pretty bad. also, anything unusual about the property, not even relating to the appraiser, will raise the CU 'red flag' score. that becomes an underwriting issue. the person looking at the CU screen can get a lot of information with their overlays, that you can't get. however, the funny thing this is that CU doesn't explain why the red flags. mostly, it's not the group thinking. one reviewer got a feeling, from a CU pattern, as to what CU might be thinking was wrong. 6 appraisers could be wrong, you could be right, but you get red flagged.

with a 2.5 score, the lender should not have bothered you, they don't have to accept every red flag. they can override them. but with a 4 score, they have no safe harbour.

 

[Restrain]

Working in Texas, I routinely would get these kickbacks with ‘better’ comps. Found out the data mining was taking refinance loans, treating them as sales, then assuming that it was an 80%LTV and creating a sale price. Talk about artificially creating an inflated market...

 

[glenn walker]

A 2.5 is the highest CU score I have ever seen... most are 3 and a 5 is considered a very high risk appraisal, sometimes all it takes is replacing one of the comps with one the CU spit-out and boom , that 5 goes down to a 3 instantly - Go figure