APPRAISER SELECTION PROCESS

NOVEMBER 26, 2023 – I received the following question from a staff appraiser with a bank. My answer follows his email.
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I am looking for direction/clarification on the regulations that discuss how an appraiser should be selected (specifically for commercial FRT’s). I work in the appraisal department of a bank and I need to prepare some internal policies/procedures/discussions on selecting an appraiser to engage. Many lenders feel they should be provided three choices and allow them or their customers to select the appraiser based on the lowest fee or the quickest turn time for the appraisal. They think that all that should be done is to not disclose the appraiser names and everything will be okay. However, my interpretation is that the appraiser should be selected based on their experience with the property type and the location in which the property is located. The regulations never appear to be direct enough, or all in one document to show how allowing lenders or borrower to participate in the selection would be viewed by bank examiners and regulatory agencies.
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We start with the following requirement from the 2010 Interagency Appraisal and Evaluation Guidelines (IAEG):

An institution’s selection process should ensure that a qualified, competent and
independent person is selected to perform a valuation assignment. An institution should
maintain documentation to demonstrate that the appraiser or person performing an evaluation is competent, independent, and has the relevant experience and knowledge for the market, location, and type of real property being valued. Further, the person who selects or oversees the selection of appraisers or persons providing evaluation services should be independent from the loan production area.

The other pertinent quote follows:

Moreover, the Guidelines stress that an institution should not select a valuation method or tool solely because it provides the highest value, the lowest cost, or the fastest response or
turnaround time.

Besides independence, the next most important item is to select an appraiser (or evaluator) that is competent in regard to the property type and subject market. That much is a given. There is no gray area.

So, the question becomes how can we BOTH select a competent appraiser AND allow the loan officer (and usually the borrower) to select from among several fee quotes?

Financial institutions accomplish this by bidding assignments to a group of competent appraisers. For example, the subject is a basic 5,000 SF, owner-occupied warehouse in a city of 100,000 people. It is likely the financial institution has 3 or 5 or more appraisers on their approved list that are competent to appraise this property in this market. So, we send out an RFP to three appraisers. All are equally competent to perform this assignment. We get the following bids:

Appraiser A – $2,500 / 3 Weeks

Appraiser B – $3,000 / 2 Weeks

Appraiser C – $2,000 / 4 Weeks

Over the past 3 decades, 95%+ of the banks and credit unions I have worked with forward the quotes exactly as shown above to the loan officer. The key is to not disclose the appraiser names. Borrowers and loan officers cannot suggest appraisers to use or not use. But, examiners and regulators are ok with them choosing from the anonymous quotes shown above.

Have we met the requirement of engaging a competent appraiser? Yes.

Have we helped the loan officer (and borrower) have enough information to make a time and price decision? Yes.

Are the examiners and regulators ok with this process? In my 30+ years of being involved in the appraisal process with financial institutions, I have not heard of a single objection.

There are two keys to making this acceptable:

  1. You can show that you only bid the assignment to competent appraisers; and,
  2. You do not disclose the appraiser names when sharing the bid information with the loan officer.

Maybe you are asking what the other 5% of financial institutions do. It may be less than that actually. This small group includes how I did things when I was Chief Appraiser. The appraisal department selected the best bid to go with. When requesting an appraisal to be ordered, the loan officer would let us know if time or cost was more important. This method speeds up the process and also allows us to spread the work around to the approved appraisers. The appraisal time is delayed when the loan officer/borrower make the selection. I have seen delays of weeks or longer. Also, through the blind selection process one appraiser may get too many assignments at once. Some appraisers have a habit of always bidding low and quick, even when swamped with work and knowing they cannot meet their deadlines.

As usual, feel free to send me follow-up questions. Or suggestions to add to this post or clarify something I said. My email is GeorgeRMann@Aol.Com.

The Mann