Appraisers accuse federal regulators of recreating housing crisis conditions

As one might expect, appraisers are none too pleased about the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, and the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve proposing to eliminate the appraisal requirement on certain home sales of $400,000 and below. Earlier this week, the FDIC, OCC, and Fed proposed increasing the appraisal threshold from $250,000 to $400,000, meaning that some home sales of $400,000 and below would no longer require an appraisal. According to FDIC data, increasing the appraisal threshold from $250,000 to $400,000 would have exempted an additional 214,000 mortgages from the agencies’ appraisal requirement in 2017.