How to check who is actually appraising your house

A page called “meet the appraisers” that meets no appraiser

Reading competitors’ sites is an ordinary part of running a business, and recently I noticed something while doing it: several North Texas appraisal firms are running substantially the same about page.

Not similar in the way two plumbers’ sites are similar. The same paragraphs, in the same order, with the same slightly strange typographic habit — one word in the middle wrapped in quotation marks for no reason I can work out, reproduced faithfully on each site. Same closing line inviting you to call. Same claim to be at the top of the industry. The firm names and phone numbers change; the prose does not.

It is a website template sold to appraisal firms. That is not a scandal on its own. Plenty of good professionals buy a website package because building one is not their job.

But it tells you that the page is not describing anybody. When a heading says “meet the appraisers” and the section beneath it names no appraiser, holds no licence number and shows no face, the page has not told you anything about who will knock on your door. It cannot, because it was written before anyone knew.

The sentence that should stop you

One line in that template is worth more attention than the anonymity, and it is this: the firm offers to help home sellers insure they’re getting top dollar.

Read that as a client and it sounds like service. Read it as an appraiser and it is a problem.

An appraiser is not your advocate. The entire value of the document comes from the fact that the person who wrote it had no stake in which way the number went. That is why an appraisal is accepted by a court, an appraisal review board, the IRS and the other side’s attorney, and a market analysis from an agent is not. An appraiser who markets themselves as being on the seller’s side is advertising away the only thing that makes the report worth having.

My fees are quoted in writing in advance and are never contingent on the value reported, on a direction of value, or on whether a protest succeeds or a sale closes. That is not a courtesy. It is the condition that makes the opinion worth anything, and it is the first thing I would ask any appraiser to put in writing.

Three registries, about ninety seconds

Everything below is public, free, and does not require you to tell anyone you are looking.

A note on the last row, because it is the one people get wrong. An appraisal management company is a legitimate and regulated part of the industry. Most lender work runs through one, for good reasons that came out of the last housing crisis. The issue is never that an AMC exists. It is that when you hire privately and your order goes through an intermediary, you may be paying a company and receiving the work of someone you were never introduced to and did not choose.

The ASC notes that state agencies submit registry data at least monthly and that it has not independently verified it, so for anything time-sensitive the state board is the better source.

Five questions before you pay anybody

These work on the phone, they take a minute, and the answers are checkable.

1. Who will sign the report, and what is their licence number? There is a correct answer to this and it is a name and a number, offered without hesitation. If the answer is the company name, ask again.

2. Is that the same person who will inspect the house? It is normal and permitted for an appraiser to be assisted. It is not normal for you to be unable to find out. If someone else inspects, the report has to say so.

3. Is the fee fixed, in writing, and independent of the outcome? A fee that moves with the value, or with whether a protest succeeds, is disqualifying.

4. Are you appraising in this market regularly? Geographic competency is a real requirement, not a slogan. An appraiser who works a county every week knows things about it that an hour of research does not produce — which is why I publish what I have measured in each of the markets I cover rather than claiming to cover all of North Texas.

5. How long have you been licensed in Texas, and how many assignments have you taken in this county this year? This is the question that separates a long career from a long career here, and the answer is checkable on the national registry in about a minute. The next section is how.

How long have they been doing this here?

Two different facts get blurred together in appraisal marketing, and separating them is probably the single most useful thing on this page.

Years in the profession is not years in this market. Someone can hold a credential for fifteen years, move to Texas last spring, and describe themselves as a fifteen-year appraiser. Both halves of that sentence are true. Neither tells you whether they have ever valued a property in your county.

Texas has had a lot of people arrive recently, and appraisers are people. There is nothing wrong with moving here. There is something wrong with arriving and immediately claiming to know a market you have not worked.

Checking it takes about a minute

The Appraisal Subcommittee’s National Registry has an advanced search with a licensing-state field. Leave that field blank and search by name, and you see the credentials that person holds across states rather than just the one they are using on you. Then look at the Texas credential specifically through the TALCB licence search.

A long record somewhere else and a short one here is not disqualifying. It is just a thing worth knowing before you hire, and worth asking about: how long have you been appraising in Texas, and how many assignments have you taken in this county this year?

What geographic competency actually buys you

It is easy to hear “local expertise” as marketing. Here is what it means concretely, using things I only know because I have measured them in these counties:

• The MLS acreage field is frequently populated with the square-foot figure instead — 13.2% of Johnson County records, 7.6% of Tarrant, 6.6% of Hood. An appraiser who trusts that field produces a land adjustment built on a number that is off by a factor of 43,560.
• Azle sits in three counties. A sale a thousand feet from the subject may be in a different appraisal district with a completely different land pattern.
• In Crowley, 79.3% of post-2015 sales closed with the seller paying something back, at a median 3.0% of price. Treat those recorded prices as cash-equivalent and the whole grid tilts upward.
• In Arlington, the price per square foot barely moves across fifty years of construction and then steps 27% at the 2015 line. An age adjustment taken from intuition is either noise or a large error, depending on which comparables were picked.
• In Granbury, a single subdivision is roughly an eighth of the entire market.

None of that is in a textbook, none of it is in the licensing exam, and none of it can be acquired in the hour between taking an order and driving to the property. It comes from working the same counties repeatedly and checking the data rather than trusting it. That is what the requirement is actually about.

This is not a matter of taste. On conventional lender work, Fannie Mae’s appraiser selection criteria require the appraiser to have the knowledge needed for the specific geographic location and particular property type, and knowledge of and access to all necessary and appropriate local data sources for that area, including the MLS and government records. The guide warns in terms that appraisers not familiar with specific real estate markets may lack adequate information to produce a reliable appraisal.

And there is a sentence in it that settles the argument. The professional standards allow an appraiser who lacks the necessary knowledge to take the assignment anyway, provided they disclose it and acquire the competency. Fannie Mae does not permit that route at all — the guide states plainly that it does not allow the USPAP flexibility. On a conventional loan file the appraiser is supposed to already have the local knowledge before accepting, not acquire it on the way to the property.

The same section makes the lender responsible for selecting appraisers and for the quality of their work, and says quality is a key criterion that must outweigh fee and turnaround time. Worth knowing, because fee and turnaround are exactly what the fastest-growing appraisal businesses advertise.

Trainees: the inspection is not where it breaks

This one is widely misunderstood in both directions, so it is worth being precise.

A trainee doing work on your appraisal is permitted in Texas. That is how the profession trains people, and it was how I learned. The Texas rule requires a trainee to appraise only under the active, personal and diligent direction and supervision of a supervisory appraiser, who remains responsible for the work as though they had done it themselves. The rule does not require the supervisor to be physically present at the property inspection. Anyone telling you a trainee inspection is automatically a violation is overstating it.

What the rules do fix is the scale and the paper trail:

• A supervisory appraiser may supervise no more than three trainees at a time — up to five only where they have held a certified credential for more than five years, the Board has approved a supervision plan, and progress reports are kept (22 TAC §153.21(a)(3)).
• A trainee who signs a report must include their licence number and the word “Trainee” in the signature (§153.21(a)(5)). You can see this on the signature page of a report.
• The supervisor must approve and sign the trainee’s appraisal log at least quarterly (§153.21(d)(3)).
• Anyone who provided significant appraisal assistance has to be disclosed. TALCB puts it plainly: a supervisor must not omit or misrepresent a trainee’s role.

On lender work there is a second rule, and it is the one that actually bites.

Fannie Mae permits a trainee to perform a significant amount of the appraisal, or all of it. It also agrees with Texas that the supervisory appraiser does not need to physically inspect the subject property or comparables. So far, so permissive. Then it specifies the signatures:

• The trainee signs the left side of the appraiser certification.
• A licensed or certified supervisory appraiser signs the right side, certifying that they directly supervised the preparer and take full responsibility for the report.
• The appraiser who signs must acknowledge in the report the extent of the professional assistance provided by others, and certify that each named individual was qualified to do what they did.

Read those together and the picture is clear. Who walked the house is not the compliance question. Who signed, and what the report says about who did the work, is. A trainee inspecting alone is permitted. A lender appraisal with no certified appraiser signing the right side and taking full responsibility is not an appraisal that meets the requirement, no matter who inspected — and a report that is silent about the assistance it received is a disclosure failure on top of it.

FHA is tighter again. The FHA Appraiser Roster requires a state-certified residential or general appraiser, and roster credentials are validated against the ASC National Registry — which does not list trainee credentials at all. A trainee cannot be the appraiser of record on an FHA assignment.

So the version to carry around is short. Ask who will inspect the property, and on a loan file look at who signed. A trainee inspecting is allowed. Not being told, or a report that does not say, is a different thing.

On my assignments the question has one answer: I do the inspection, the analysis and the report, and I sign it. I have no trainees, so there is no left side.

What a signature actually commits someone to

An appraisal report carries a certification, and the appraiser signs it. That signature is a set of personal statements — about independence, about having no present or prospective interest in the property, about the analysis being the signer’s own, and about who else contributed to it.

A company cannot sign that. Only a person can, and that person’s licence is what is exposed if any of it turns out to be untrue. It is the reason the question “who signs it” is not a formality: it is the only question whose answer carries consequences for someone.

Which is also why the reviews matter in a specific way. A named appraiser accumulates a public record over years, attached to their own name, that they cannot detach themselves from. An anonymous “team” carries no such record, and a testimonial on a company’s own website with no name, no date and no way to reach the person who supposedly wrote it is not evidence of anything. A profile on a platform the business does not control is.

What this is not an argument for

It is not an argument that a one-person shop is automatically better. A larger firm with several named, licensed appraisers and clear assignment of who does what is a perfectly good way to run an appraisal practice, and some of the best residential work in this region comes out of exactly that.

It is not an argument that every firm running a template website is doing bad work. Buying a website and doing careful appraisals are unrelated skills.

And it is not an argument against appraisal management companies, which exist because of a real problem and are regulated accordingly.

It is one argument only: before you pay for somebody’s professional judgement, you are entitled to know whose judgement you are buying. That takes ninety seconds to establish, the registries are free, and any appraiser worth hiring will hand you the licence number before you ask.