[AMC Factory] River Views Less Valuable Because of “Smelly Fish Boats”

actual AMC (car) factory

AMC Factory For a year and a half, our firm tangled with the bureaucracy of Landsafe, the poster child for the appraisal management company (AMC) industry. While not all AMC’s are bad, their relationship to the mortgage process is fundamentally flawed. The estimation of market value of mortgage collateral to enable lenders to make informed decisions has been commoditized to the point where most mortgage appraisals are generally not worth the paper they are written on. This series is from an appraiser’s perspective, about a profession left to die by the side of the road.

Incidentally, some may view this series as providing cheap shots since it is always easy to pick out unflattering examples of misconduct in a large industry. You bet it is. After what good appraisers have observed over the past several years, the AMC industry deserves nothing more than that.

River Views Less Valuable Because of “Smelly Fish Boats”

Here’s one broker’s experience:

…client in [Manhattan] (urban market) could not buy the 10th Floor river-view apartment he wanted because his bank assigned an appraiser from Suffolk County, Long Island, (suburban market several hours away) who appraised it at less than the recent sale price of a 3rd Floor apartment in the same line, which had no river-view, and the client was short $20,000 cash which he did not have; the appraiser explained that where he comes from residences near enough to the shore to have a water-view, always have lower value perhaps because of the smelly fishboats. The bank would not do another appraisal because of the belief that all appraisers in a state are equally able to appraise any property in that state, no exceptions. So the client had to move into another rental apartment.

My thoughts

Local market knowledge is the primary qualification to hire a specific appraiser for an assignment. Merely having a license in the same state as the subject property to be appraised does not make someone competent.

A continuing refrain among real estate agents is that the appraiser came from another market, often 3-5 hours away. Not something that was the status quo in prior years.

Sigh.

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Workers' Rights: Is Ikea's U.S. Factory One Big, Fat, Racist, Modern-Day Sweatshop?

× Like us and you'll find top breaking news in your Facebook newsfeed. Sign up for our daily email newsletter and get top stories and breaking news delivered to your inbox. Monday, April 11, 2011, by Sarah Firshein

Photo via L.A. Times

The first American Ikea factory, located in Danville, Va., has recently come under attack for a variety of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad things ranging from forcing overtime work upon its 335 employees to mandating when they can take eight of their 12 allotted vacation days. In addition, despite the fact that the furniture chain's Swedwood factories in Sweden are unionized, workers in Virginia have been required attend meetings where they've been scared out of forming a union. Topping it all off are six black workers who have filed discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for being continually assigned overnight shifts in the lowest-paying departments. (Swedwood just settled one for a paltry $2,000.) Still, maintains one of the plant's Sweden-based union leaders, "Ikea is a very strong brand and they lean on some kind of good Swedishness in their business profile. That becomes a complication when they act like they do in the United States." Another spokesperson called the situation "sad." Here's a word of advice, guys: being racist and treating employees without dignity is more than just a "complication," and it's more than just "sad."

· Ikea's U.S. factory churns out unhappy workers [L.A. Times via Boing Boing]

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