Appraiser Licensing and Enforcement with guest Robin Forrester

Transcript

Narrator: 0:00

This podcast is for educational purposes only, does not constitute legal advice and does not create an attorney-client relationship. If you need legal assistance about a legal problem, contact an attorney.

Cimone Murphree: 0:15

Well, good afternoon, Mr. Forrester. Thank you again for being with us. We are very excited to talk to you today. I know Mr. Beaulieu and you used to work at the Texas Appraiser, licensing and Certification Board together. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and your role at TALCB?

Robin Forrester: 0:39

Sure Again. My name is Robin Forrester. I’m a certified residential appraiser. I’m also an AQB certified USPAP instructor. My appraisal career started back in 1982, before even licensing. All you had to have at that time was just a sales, a real estate sales license.

Robin Forrester: 1:06

And then you were considered an appraiser. I started appraising actual going out and looking at houses like three weeks after I got my license as a real estate agent, so I didn’t really know what I was doing. Fortunately, I was working for a company that had some people that could at least point me in the right direction and show me the right end of the tape to use to measure a house. I was at that company for about six years before I went to another company, um. Then I actually uh from 98 to um 2010, I had my own appraisal company, um, and then in 2010, uh, troy was one of the people who hired me to come on at the state um as a regulator. So that’s kind of my background.

Robin Forrester: 2:02

I got my AQB certified dispatch instructor certification in 2018. I’m a retired member of the Appraisal Institute. I held two designations with them the SRA designation and the AIRRS designation, which is a review designation. My entire career has been spent in appraising houses, real property. I don’t have any experience in the commercial realm whatsoever, so that’s kind of a little background about what I’ve been up to for the past 44 years.

Troy Beaulieu: 2:39

And Robin, when did you end up retiring? I know you were an investigator for roughly about 11, 12 years. When did you retire from the state?

Robin Forrester: 2:49

Yeah, my start date with the state was September of 2010. And then my end date was end of August of 21. So almost 12 years.

Cimone Murphree: 2:58

And what are you doing today?

Robin Forrester: 3:01

Today I’m retired. Today I’m retired, Although I do. I do consulting work, for mostly through word of mouth of people that have recently gotten a complaint. I consult with them and well, I’m sure we’ll be talking more about that. But you know, just kind of talking to them off the ledge, because your first reaction to getting complained is oh no, I’m you know they’re going to kick me out of the business. Well, that’s probably 99% or 99.9%, not true? So I’m sure we’ll be talking more about that, but that’s that’s. What I’m doing now is expert stuff and consulting.

Cimone Murphree: 3:51

Your role as an investigator. What were some of the some of your duties?

Robin Forrester: 3:56

When I started with the board, they were very much into enforcement. They were very much into enforcement. They had no issues in accepting and promoting harsh disciplines when needed, but did not have an issue with that. I don’t know if they still do or not, but they had investigator trainings, and I went to three different investigator trainings levels one, two and three. They taught us that enforcement needed to happen. You needed strong enforcement to protect the consumers out there, and that’s what this is all about is protecting the consumer.

Robin Forrester: 4:53

I was also very lucky to be in the same office with a gentleman who had been around enforcement well since the agency had started, back in the I believe, the late 1990s, who was kind enough to take me on as a I guess as a trainee, if nothing else and mentored me through the process. So I was very lucky in that regard. So I was very lucky in that regard. And then in 2014, the Appraisal Institute came out with a class called Review Theory Residential. I went to Orlando to take that class.

Robin Forrester: 5:37

It was a two day class instructed by a gentleman who’s an incredible instructor, and the light kind of came on for me Like, oh okay, this is what I’m supposed to be looking for when I’m reviewing somebody’s work. It all kind of came together at that point and that made me want to work that much harder to become an expert in review and in USPAP, because that is one of the that’s what the agency is charged ultimately with enforcing is USPAP. So it never did quite make sense to me, like okay, well, I’m an investigator and I’m supposed to be investigating all these complaints for compliance with USPAP, but I’m not an expert in USPAP and I need to fix that, and so I did, and that’s why I got my USPAP certificate.

Troy Beaulieu: 6:38

I remember many funny conversations when we were preparing for hearings and I would ask Robin questions about that whether or not he was an expert because that’s a common discussion that lawyers will have and and he struggled with that at first and he kept saying, no, I’m not really an expert because I haven’t taken all these advanced classes. And I had to say, robin, you’re an expert, you’re okay. But Robin was always very interested in learning more and getting better educated, and that really culminated in 2018 when he got his AQB certified, uspap instructor designation and, of course, then he got the residential review designation as well. That really added a lot of credit and credibility to you know, when he had to testify in court totally, and USPAP is the the standards that all appraisers are held to correct that’s correct.

Robin Forrester: 7:39

It’s a national standard.

Troy Beaulieu: 7:40

Yes, uniform standards of professional appraisal practice and they, like we were talking about earlier, simone, they’re promulgated by the Appraisal Foundation, because they are the entity charged by Congress with creating these standards, and then under federal law, they get enforced by all the different jurisdictions, all the state appraiser boards. So it’s a little bit unusual, but it is a nationwide standard that every state, every jurisdiction is enforcing.

Cimone Murphree: 8:15

How does this process work? What is it if that was an aspiring appraiser? What are some of the things that I need to make sure that I have done before I can be licensed?

Robin Forrester: 8:28

So if a person wants to enter the appraisal profession, there’s a couple of steps that you’ve got to go through. First of all, you’ve got to have the education. You know, I don’t know if a college degree is still required Troy might know the answer to that, but when I started it was. So you have to have the education. There’s a certain number of hours that you have to have. One portion of the TALCB deals strictly with education. They have all the courses that you can take and you know, get that done.

Robin Forrester: 9:08

I don’t know how many hours it is to become licensed and then certified. I used to know that. But then you have to have the experience. You have to actually go out with your sponsor, your supervisor, and learn how to appraise, learn how to measure a house, learn how to drive the cops, learn how to measure a house, learn how to drive the comps, learn how to look at a neighborhood. You have to get a certain number of hours to become licensed, and I think that’s a thousand hours, it was, and then maybe 1,500 to become certified. So, and then you’ve got to. There’s a test. There’s a test to be licensed and then a test to be certified. So, and then you’ve got to. There’s a test. There’s a test to be licensed, and then it has to be certified. So you have to pass the exam and then you’re either licensed or certified.

Troy Beaulieu: 10:01

You also have to go through a fingerprint based background check and nationwide criminal background check that gets screened. So that’s also a part of the requirements. And all of these requirements are set out by the appraiser qualifications board, the AQB, which is one of the boards for the appraisal foundation. Again, it’s this nationwide standard for getting a license. And so, um, when robin and I were working together, um at the time, um, he was handling sometimes experience audits, so his job was to sample work product from people who’d been an appraiser trainee and they were getting those for for lack of a better word apprenticeship hours of experience. And then Robin was looking at one or two samples of their work product to make sure that it generally reflected that they had the practical know-how to actually do an appraisal that was compliant with the standards.

Robin Forrester: 11:07

So you kind of learn what to look for, and that was where a conversation with the applicant, the trainee, led to some very harsh discipline occurring through that process.

Troy Beaulieu: 11:29

Yeah, robin’s talking about appraisal inspection fraud really that we sometimes encountered. Obviously, you have to be very careful when you’re a regulator. You want to make sure you’re not making assumptions and you actually have real evidence because you got someone’s career and livelihood in your hands. But sometimes we did actually find instances where people hadn’t been forthright about who was doing the inspection that was being required by the lending institution. And come to find out, you know, the brand new baby appraiser, who’s a trainee, was the one going doing it without any supervision from the supervisory appraiser, who’s really the one that the lending company was expecting to have done that and required that to be done. So sometimes we did have audits that ended up turning into complaints because we were uncovering, you know, pretty significant problems with that process the as a, like you said, troy, when what is the?

Cimone Murphree: 12:56

not a pre-licensure? I can’t think of the word for it. I guess an intern right what it is.

Troy Beaulieu: 12:59

A appraiser trainee is what they call them. Yeah, they’re getting trained by the supervisor, and so you know, it’s just just like you know. You know, if you wanted to hire a lawyer, you don’t want to hire the brand new law student who’s being trained by the lawyer, you want to hire the lawyer. And so if you agree and say yes, I want to hire the lawyer, you expect the real lawyer to be there and be a part of the process. And then you come to find out, oh, in fact, that lawyer’s never looked at my file a day in your life. My, my, uh law student did all the work. Um, you know, that’s kind of concerning. You’re like, hey, I’m, I’m paying good money for a lawyer, not a law student. You know, I don’t mind having a a law student be involved in the process, but, um, but I certainly expect a lawyer to be there working right beside them and making sure right done correctly.

Troy Beaulieu: 13:55

So we, we ran into that a few times. Yeah, it was rather, sometimes rather dramatically when we would find instances where, oh, not only was this trainee doing it all on their own, but the supervisor was out of the country on vacation.

Cimone Murphree: 14:10

Oh, definitely weren’t there. Are there any other? And maybe that’s not so common, but are there any common things that you see with applicants or appraiser trainees that may affect their application for licensure?

Robin Forrester: 14:39

Well, I’ve found that, and, as it should be, an appraiser trainee is very loyal and, like I said, they should be very loyal to their supervisory approach. I mean, that’s a person they meet with every day. Hopefully, you know, they’re maybe spend a lot of time every day with that person. So if there is something going on that shouldn’t be going on, they’re very reluctant to be forthright about that because they don’t want to throw their supervisory pressure under the bus Again at the same time. As you know, in enforcement sometimes we had to make those hard decisions about look, you know you got to complain with us. What’s really going on?

Troy Beaulieu: 15:30

um and so and sometimes the appraiser trainees, since they’re learning the process, they don’t even necessarily know there’s anything wrong. They they are going through this process and and as they’re learning, they’re discovering. Oh, maybe this person that was training me was training me the wrong way and I just didn’t know.

Cimone Murphree: 15:49

Is there anything that you have seen most commonly get an appraiser in trouble? What are things that you know some appraisers may not know that could land?

Robin Forrester: 15:59

them in a bunch of trouble some appraisers may not know they could land them in a budget trouble. I’ve got a whole list here, so now would be a good time to maybe go through some of these, because these are things that I see when I’m consulting with people.

Cimone Murphree: 16:12

Yeah.

Robin Forrester: 16:14

And they’re asking for my help.

Robin Forrester: 16:15

Look, I’ve got this complaint and I think if they’ll pay attention to some of these things, not that I want to take away from my business or Troy’s business, but it will help them not have to require our services. So if you don’t mind, can I just go through some of these that are very common. I see almost every time that I review somebody’s appraisal report. First of all, if you’re trying to let me see the correct way to word this, if you want to lessen your chances of getting a complaint, don’t accept the off-ball assignment, and everybody knows what those are. I just reviewed an appraisal report that a gentleman in San Antonio had done. It was a $750,000 duplex in the middle of downtown San Antonio and there was not much work to work with. There was no cost. You could do the cost approach, which he didn’t even do.

Robin Forrester: 17:23

It was brand new construction, why He’d only been a certified appraiser for about six months. Why would you even want to take on that assignment? You probably don’t have the competency which is required to accept that assignment. It’s just most of these things not most probably all of these Fannie Mae complaints I see are on oddball properties out in the middle of nowhere a 3,000 square foot house, 100 acres out in the middle of nowhere. They are not going to fit Fannie Mae guidelines. They’re just not A real quick story.

Robin Forrester: 18:12

I assisted a gentleman who lives up in the Texas Panhandle and he had two Fannie Mae complaints. And he had two Fannie Mae complaints and like this gentleman said, robin, this is what I do for a living. I do all these hard oddball assignments because nobody else wants to, nobody else will do it. The bank knows that I will. And I said, okay, but you just got to realize that your chances of getting a complaint are going to be, he said. On the one, the bank actually told him look, this is not going to go to a secondary lender, this is going to be kept in-house. Well, guess what? It got through their committee and Fannie Mae picked it up and they filed a complaint because the gentleman literally had to go a hundred miles away to find comps, which is not if you. If you know that area, that’s not at all unusual, it’s just that it’s they’re not going to fit Fannie Mae guidelines. So if it were me, I would, especially early in my appraisal career, I would stick to the cookie cutter assignments. You know where you can have three or four comps on the same street or a block away, you’re not going to get in trouble on those. If you did, you got a problem. But your chances of getting a complaint are going to be a lot less on those than a more difficult assignment. That would be my first thing. If you have a situation occur where you’ve been asked to do, maybe correct, something in a report, or you have to come back and they want something else, your client does Make sure that the different iterations are consistent with each other.

Robin Forrester: 20:15

Again, I was assisting a gentleman that got a Fannie Mae complaint. He had five different iterations of the report. In one he said that the property had a residential view and there was no issues. In the second report he said it was in an adverse location. Well, it can’t be both Either there’s no issues or there are. Which one is it so you want to be careful.

Robin Forrester: 20:49

If you do have different iterations of an appraisal report, make sure they’re consistent. I would highly highly encourage you to read the certification in the appraisal report. I think there’s 25 items that an appraiser has to attest to. I have complied with all 25 items. Well, did you really? You need to read that and make sure that you have. That will get you every time. If you have it, make sure there’s no misrepresentation in the report. If you say I used the best comps, the closest comps to the second property, there were no others you need to make sure that that’s a true statement, because people are going to check. If you have a complaint, that’s one of the things the investigator is going to look for.

Troy Beaulieu: 21:48

I can remember more than one time Robin and I would be dealing with a case and an appraiser would say something like in order to figure out my cost approach, I utilized this particular cost publication manual, typically like a Marshall and Swift product. But then you would talk to them and you would find out oh actually I just got some costs from builders and I had left that in my report. It was kind of boilerplate and I didn’t update it, and so now it wasn’t anything intentional, but you have statements in your report that are not truthful and accurate because you weren’t paying attention to what you had in there.

Robin Forrester: 22:31

Simone, another big item that I find is boilerplate comments in an appraisal report. Typically appraisers will clone one appraisal report. If they’re in a certain neighborhood they’ll clone it and use it for another appraisal report. Sometimes information gets conveyed that has no relevance to what you’re appraising. So you want to be real careful using borderplate commentary in your appraisal reports.

Robin Forrester: 23:07

The big thing, one of the big complaints that Fannie likes to, or one of their big items, is lack of support for your adjustments. You know if you have a $100,000 location adjustment or quality of construction adjustment, you need to have a really, really good work. It needs to be in the report actually how and why you arrived at that $100,000 adjustment. At least be in your work file Because again the regulator is going to want to know. They’re going to want to know where’d you come up with that adjustment, what was your rationale, what was your analysis of how you came up with that adjustment adjustment.

Robin Forrester: 24:09

I would like to see appraisers develop a working knowledge of USPAP. The two out the seven hour, every two year, update USPAP, update of USPAP that you take online. That’s just not going to get you where you want to go. I’m not saying that you’ve got to be an AQB certified youth map instructor. But you need to have a working knowledge of what’s required. What am I supposed to be doing? What are you supposed to be doing?

Robin Forrester: 24:31

And the last thing if it were me and I can give you a story about this that I’m sure Troy will remember you need to get on social media. That is because if a regulator finds out, an investigator finds out, that you inspected a property, or you allege that you inspected a property on a certain date, but there’s a picture of you on social media on a cruise on that date, you know it’s kind of hard to be at the property and you know wherever. While you’re out on the cruise or your scheme, or you’re in Washington DC, wherever you are, you can look at the date on the appraisal report and correlate that with the date that you’re out doing whatever. And I just think it’d be best to get off social media, which is what nobody’s going to do or nobody’s going to like. But that’s another issue that could be a problem for you if you get a major complaint.

Robin Forrester: 25:42

Less than 2% of appraisers get complaints and that’s something you can’t control. You really can’t control. You can’t control a homeowner being upset with you because they think their house is worth $700,000 and you only came in at $690,000. And they’re going to file a complaint. You just can’t control that. But yes, and I do want to make that point 98 to even more than that percent of the appraisers are doing the right thing out there. But just like any other profession nurses, doctors, lawyers, whatever there’s always going to be a couple of the bad apples out there. So that’s what they’re in the business for is protecting the consumers from the bad apples.

Cimone Murphree: 26:30

Well, Mr. Forster, thank you very much for coming and spending your afternoon with us and giving us some great knowledge. Thanks for sharing your stories with us too. I know that our viewers are hopefully going to brush up on their USPAP and you know, uspap knowledge and you know, and hopefully they, they, you know. Listen to, to what you had to say about some tips and tricks, some things that you would like to see appraisers doing better best practices.

Troy Beaulieu: 27:06

Yeah, thank you so much.

Troy Beaulieu: 27:08

Thank you so much, Robin, for sharing some of your insight and wisdom. I know it was always an interesting experience working with you at the board because we never knew what was going to pop up in the newest complaint, the newest file we got, never knew what was going to pop up in the newest complaint, the newest file we got. But I think there’s definitely a lot of lessons learned that you shared with our viewers here today that can really help keep you out of trouble. And knowing that these are the types of things to watch out for and these are the types of things to avoid Because, like you said, even if at the end of the day the complaint gets dismissed, you hate to have to go through that whole process. You know if you can avoid it, if you can change, kind of, be more proactive and be more aware of how your regulator operates and how the board and the investigation process works, Just makes your life easier and you don’t have to come visit me or visit Robin and get you know legal or expert advice.

Robin Forrester: 28:07

Yeah, and I just want to say that you know you really can’t help getting a complaint and you shouldn’t. Don’t go through every day, every appraisal assignment, thinking, oh man, you man, it’s got to be perfect or I’m going to get a complaint. You don’t want to have a career like that. That’s miserable. But it is good to know that Troy’s available If you do get a complaint, or myself, that there is help. It does help to have somebody on your side, whether you choose to fight it yourself and fight is probably not the right word but to pursue the process yourself or get expert help. So there is help out there if you want that.

Troy Beaulieu: 28:55

Robin, thanks so much for taking some time and talking to our viewers. I mean really taking some time and talking to our viewers. I mean really the point of our podcast is to get people more aware of their regulator, and you obviously spent a little over 10 years being a regulatory investigator and so I think your insights and your feedback to appraisers is really important so they can know what to watch out for and hopefully stay proactive and not get a complaint.

Robin Forrester: 29:26

That’s what I would be doing.

Narrator: 29:28

Empower your professional journey. Know your regulator. The podcast that inspires you to engage.