Kingman AZ Appraisals

03/31/2026

By: Jeremy Bagott
UNLIKE L.A. OFFICIALS, U.S. HOMEBUYERS ARE OBLIVIOUS TO DOCTORED REPORTS

VENTURA, Calif. (March 27, 2026) – In the aftermath of the most destructive fire in the city’s history, Los Angeles Fire Chief Jaime Moore submitted an after-action report on the Palisades Fire that had been doctored to shield top officials from scrutiny. The report concealed the officials’ failure to prepare for and fight the January 2025 fire, which killed 12 people and destroyed thousands of homes. The latest chip to fall: Four of the five members of the city’s Board of Fire Commissioners have jumped ship.

Unfortunately, the same sense of alarm has not been registered nationally over the roughly 400,000 taxpayer-backed mortgages underwritten each month based on the systemic doctoring of appraisal reports by government-sponsored mortgage giant Freddie Mac, a practice that has also fattened mortgage giant Fannie Mae. Borrowers, and the taxpayers backing the mortgages, are almost completely oblivious to what’s been going on. At Freddie and Fannie, censorship has become the norm.

Since 2023, government-backed mortgage giant Freddie Mac has maintained a secret and growing list of words it expunges from appraisal reports used in government-backed mortgages with the help, and potentially the coercion, of its vendors. The censorship has turned appraisal reports, at times, into misleading gibberish or eliminated salient facts about properties that serve as collateral for trillions in federally ensured mortgages.

The distorted reports have been relied on by underwriters, lending institutions, investors in mortgage-backed securities and ultimately U.S. taxpayers. Because defects with properties aren’t able to be described, they’re not able to be analyzed and adjusted for. This has played a part in the current housing inflation through a type of self-reinforcing feedback loop. Just like in Lake Wobegon, all homes are now above-average.

Initially under the pretext of removing “problematic” words and phrases related to diversity, equity and inclusion, employees at Freddie Mac soon expanded the ban to eliminate red flags that cause transactional friction. Freddie Mac has arm-twisted vendors to incorporate textual analysis into software used by lenders and appraisers. Independent real property appraisers are hired by lenders uniquely for their independence. They are hired to be the eyes and ears of the lending institutions. The appraisers have no direct relationship with Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae.

The twins are currently in open defiance of executive orders removing identity politics and disparate-impact theory from government and publicly funded institutions.

A Freddie Mac employee named Scott Reuter has been the public face of the systemic tampering with appraisals. Freddie Mac is currently in federal conservatorship. Because Freddie Mac’s nonpublic list of banned words and phrases has been built into third-party underwriting software, investors in mortgages purchased or guaranteed by sister mortgage giant Fannie Mae have also been affected.

The censorship has turned appraisers’ observations on such things as markets, submarkets, sales trends and school districts into gobbledygook by expurgating basic words in the English language. This appears to be the point. Appraisers report that some of the banned words are known to them. They include “good,” “bad,” “high,” “low,” “strong,” “weak,” “slow,” and “rapid.” Much of the censorship is clearly designed to mask economic realities relating to the properties being appraised. Banned words include “crime,” “school district” “neighborhood,” “blight,” “student,” “preferred,” “up-and-coming,” “well-kept,” “graffiti” and “desirable” and many puzzlingly innocuous phrases like “convenient to” and “walking distance.”

Ironically, Freddie Mac’s own public advice to home buyers uses many of the words and phrases that the mortgage giant requires to be censored from third-party appraisal reports. You can see an example here. The difference? Freddie Mac executives want to push through loan originations to please their political overlords in Washington and members of the housing lobby – the lenders, Realtors and homebuilders. The housing lobby has wanted nothing more than to eliminate independent appraisers by neutering their work product in exactly this way.

Since Freddie and big sister Fannie can blacklist appraisers and punish the lenders who hire them, the censorship has real teeth. The twins can also blacklist the software developers who create appraisal software which requires the use of forms licensed to them by the mortgage giants.

Freddie’s censorship program is an example of nongovernment actors working with individuals in government to promote censorship of a class of citizens uniquely engaged for their independence.

Freddie’s censorship has meant basic observations like, “The appraised property has a high-gabled roof with two dormers” or “The property is located in the Houston Independent School District” or “The property contains an abandoned home covered in graffiti” are excised from reports. The results have created a form of “liar loan.”

The corruption of millions of valuations in federally backed loans should be as shocking as the doctoring of a report to absolve incompetent officials after a deadly fire.

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03/16/2026

Appraisers are trained and regulated to provide independent, impartial, and objective valuations of your real estate. We avoid conflicts of interest, and base conclusions on credible evidence of value. We cannot favor one party or value over another.

01/20/2026

https://appraisersblogs.com/the-amcs-coming-soon-2-a-lawsuit-near-you/

The AMCs built an entire system on silence, but the quiet parts are being said out loud, and the echo is getting harder to ignore.

01/10/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1AQb6BJ5Mf/

01/08/2026

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1MqTCqtGd2/

For a very long time, buying and owning a home was considered the pinnacle of the American Dream. It was the reward for working hard, and doing the right thing, but now, because of the Record High Inflation caused by Joe Biden and the Democrats in Congress, that American Dream is increasingly out of reach for far too many people, especially younger Americans. It is for that reason, and much more, that I am immediately taking steps to ban large institutional investors from buying more single-family homes, and I will be calling on Congress to codify it. People live in homes, not corporations. I will discuss this topic, including further Housing and Affordability proposals, and more, at my speech in Davos in two weeks.

12/12/2025

ANATOMY OF A RACKET ~ by Jeremy Bagott

VENTURA, Calif. (Dec. 12, 2025) – For decades, an obscure Washington, D.C., nonprofit with only a dozen or so employees has published a set of ever-changing copyrighted standards – and created a golden goose. Each version becomes binding law in many states without ever being legally adopted in those jurisdictions. The standards regulate how most real estate in America is valued.

The nonprofit, which exists largely in the shadows, was created by a little-known federal statute designed to deal with the largely forgotten Savings & Loan Crisis of the late 1980s.

The nonprofit, which nurtures ties to special-interest groups and so-called “partners,” continually changes the standards. To learn the law, county assessors, state-licensed appraisers and others must then continually purchase copies from the nonprofit’s online store, along with related materials. The nonprofit publisher is known as the Appraisal Foundation and the standards are known as the “Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice.”

To further exploit its government-sanctioned franchise, it created now-mandatory companion materials, began training and credentialing instructors and training state enforcement personnel. Before long, it was directly greasing the skids with state regulators by providing them things of value like free travel, meals and lodging.

Some states attempted to legally adopt each version of the fluid standards but found their rulemaking processes couldn’t keep up with the pace of the changes and simply gave up on trying to adhere to their respective administrative procedure statutes. But this didn’t stop those states from enforcing the unadopted standards on hapless licensees. Most states now enforce new versions of the privately owned standards on a bluff and in violation of their respective state constitutions. Until recently, a man by the name of David Bunton ran the tiny nonprofit as a personal fiefdom. A former employee of Bunton’s was the director of a federal agency tasked with monitoring the nonprofit.

Last year, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau exposed the nonprofit’s central pay-to-play mechanism. The nonprofit then thought it could mask the allegations by redesignating its conflicted pay-to-play sponsors as “partners.”

The most recent version of the standards promotes the pernicious theories of “disparate impact” and “disparate treatment.” To avoid the disparate-impact liability discussed in the standards, appraisers in federally backed mortgage transactions would somehow need to become experts in the race, skin color, religion, sexual preference, handicaps, familial status and national origin of property owners in the transactions they use as sales comparables. It then follows that appraisers would need to participate in fuzzy “racial balancing” as they conclude opinions of value.

This version of the copyrighted appraisal standards also promotes “social change” (the term itself is found in the newest version of the standards). One would be hard-pressed to find a more inappropriate term in rules governing real estate appraisal methods.

In April, President Trump signed Executive Order 14281. It eliminated the use of “disparate impact” doctrine across federal agencies. Thus, appraisers who appraise properties for federally backed mortgages must purchase the standards and then ignore much of the material in them.

To attend the approved continuing education courses – mandatory across the states – licensees must also now buy, at bayonet point, a copyrighted course manual and a copyrighted guidance and reference manual.

The nonprofit also throttles the credentialing of those selected to teach its copyrighted materials.

Economist George Stigler’s landmark “Theory of Economic Regulation” (1971) holds that regulation is established not to protect the public but for the benefit of the industries being regulated. This shadowy Beltway nonprofit takes Stigler’s theory to a whole new level.

12/06/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/15YdNsbaHuf/

11/20/2025

Rent or Buy? Maybe this calculator can help you decide.

Our calculator, updated in July 2025, takes the most important costs associated with buying or renting and compares the two options.

11/20/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/1AGJfvZdUW/

If you bought a home after 2009, your appraisal fee almost certainly included hundreds of dollars for a middleman you've likely never heard of.

11/19/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BiQyavaoT/

THE AFFORDABLE HOUSING DECEPTION

In the recent election for local offices, many of the candidates who won, did so by pushing the false premise that they would provide “affordable” or “attainable” housing. Promises of that nature appeal to emotion rather than logic, which is typical of those who succumb to the allure of socialism. There are many who fervently claim not to be socialists yet espouse socialist ideas, nevertheless. In fact, they may be ignorant to what socialism truly involves…which is why they may appear to be genuine in the deluded idea that they can actually provide affordable housing.

Let’s clear the confusion once and for all.

Government does not, and cannot provide affordable housing. Government has been subsidizing housing through various tax cuts, incentives, subsidies, etc. for as long as I can remember. And, in spite of all that spending, the cost of housing of all types continues to rise. Why? Do we just not spend enough taxpayer dollars on affordable or attainable housing?

The fact is that government intervention adds cost, complexity, regulation, and inefficiency, to the housing market. It also creates malinvestment, misallocation of resources, and distortion of the supply and demand for housing. Those who promise that they can provide “affordable housing” fail to understand and choose to ignore these truths. Government IS the problem.

A functional free market is the answer to the problem, but we don’t really have one of those these days.

Given the current situation, the best thing we could ask of government is to get out of the way of the housing market so it can correct the imbalances on its own.

That would involve lowering or, better yet, eliminating property tax…the most evil and immoral of all taxes. Property tax creates a huge impediment for those on fixed incomes to remain in their homes. It also creates a barrier to young families who want to enter home ownership for the first time. And it drives up the cost of rental properties whose owners must pass the increases along to renters. Nobody can hide from property tax. I just got my property tax bill…it went up $452.00 from last year.

Government overspending also increases the cost of housing. Lowering the tax burden will help more people afford rent or mortgages.

Stop subsidizing rentals and apartments. Developers make more money on these properties than they do on single family homes, and they get subsidized to do so by cities and counties. That leaves a greater tax burden on existing taxpayers so that new apartments are not coming on the tax rolls to mitigate the extra expenses they create in infrastructure or power requirements. Subsidizing rentals and apartments incentivize more to be built…and reduces the supply of single-family homes…thus driving up prices for those homes. The real estate market is in turmoil thanks to this problem.

We should also phase out and restrict corporations like Black Rock and others from purchasing rental properties. These large entities outbid potential buyers of homes and then turn them into rental properties in the middle of established neighborhoods. That practice drives up the cost of purchasing a home as well as deteriorating neighborhood appeal.

The Federal government has a lot to do with creating this problem as well. The Federal Reserve is a huge culprit, and there’s not much state or local governments can do about the fluctuation in the money supply or the massive problems created by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae.

Ask anyone who campaigns on providing “affordable” or “attainable” housing the following questions:

What is an affordable home?
How much should it cost?
Where should it be built?
How many should you build?
What type of homes are you proposing? Apartments? Duplexes? Single family homes?
What happens if the population shifts?
What will these do to existing neighborhoods?
How will it affect the taxpayers in the city or county?
Who determines eligibility for subsidies?
How do you determine the demand for these homes?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to any of these questions…which is why nobody in government can possibly answer them. They can only speculate. It’s economics 101. There is always a knowledge gap that cannot be bridged by any level of government when attempting to tackle the issue of affordable housing (or many other issues for that matter).

But a free market, however, can answer all of these questions through entrepreneurship if government simply refrains from intervening.

10/30/2025

10/03/2025

In Seoul, appraisers didn’t write op-eds. They didn’t file quiet complaints. They rallied. And Korea took notice.