News

The traditional home appraisal - long disparaged by lenders and home buyers as taking too much time and costing too much money - could be going the way of the one-car garage.

INSTEAD OF THE USUAL VISIT from an appraiser who examines every nook and cranny, some lenders are turning to automated systems that use statistical models to compute appraisal values in a matter of seconds. The systems, in many cases provided by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, work by mining databases that list sales prices of homes in a given neighborhood, and then comparing those properties with the one that is being appraised. Also taken into account is the selling price of a particular property in past transactions.

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Many of the nation's 85,000 appraisers worry the automation could put them out of work, and they contend the systems aren't always accurate.

See http://www.msnbc.com/news/602786.asp