Progress Report -- of sorts

My little project is not so little. I have finally gone through all the sales and located the case numbers and court dockets for them. This allowed me to identify the Sheriff's appraisers for each property, the appraised value used to set the minimum bid (2/3) at the Sheriff Sale, and the sale date (which is different from the date the sale was recorded).

The Appraisal Subcommittee National Registry was used to check whether the appraisers used by the Sheriff were licensed. The appraisers used were Jon Poda (Licensed Residential), William Wilcox, Robert Campbell, James Yocum, David Waddell (Certified Residential), John Cunningham, Tom Robinson, Al Wilkinson, David Troutman, James Buie, Ed Abdulla, and Phil Leonard.

The "Rules of Practice and Procedure of the Court of Common Pleas, General Division of Summit County, Ohio" were consulted; Section 11, "Foreclosures", deals with appraisers' fees. There is no specification in the Common Pleas Court Rules as to form of the appraisal report. ORC 2329.17 and 2329.18 specify that the appraisal must be done by three disinterested freeholders of the county, and that their report must be deposited with the Clerk of Courts; it does not specify any form for the appraisal to follow.

Here is where it gets interesting. Two of the appraisers are licensed by the state. Because they are licensed, the USPAP holds them to a higher standard than the other, unlicensed appraisers. ORC 4763.17 (A) states that "A certificate holder, registrant, and licensee also shall comply with the uniform standards of professional appraisal practice, as adopted by the appraisal standards board of the appraisal foundation and such other standards adopted by the real estate appraiser board, to the extent that those standards do not conflict with applicable federal standards in connection with a particular federally related transaction." Standards Rule 2-3 requires a signed certification for each written property appraisal report. The reports deposited with the Clerk of Courts do not contain the required certification.

While the Jurisdictional Exception Rule can and must be cited in the certification to maintain compliance with the Ethics Rule, there is no court rule, i.e., jurisdictional exception, for violating the requirement for a certification to be attached to every report submitted by one of the licensed appraisers.

I have no idea what an attorney might do with that kind of information, if his client felt he had gotten a raw deal in a foreclosure action. I wonder what would happen if such an attorney would simply subpoena their workfiles?

'nuther thing. After all the weeding, I have 103 sales; 73 in Kenmore (North) and 30 in Summit Lake. Twelve of the Kenmore REO sales have already been "flipped". Ten of the Summit Lake sales have been "flipped", at least one of them for more than ten times the REO sale price. A number of "flip" sales have been identified where the real estate agents handling the listing have ended up owning the property; a "strawman" was used to buy the REO and then "flip" it to the agent. I'm not going to name names here. I think what I will do is make the whole spreadsheet available for download somewhere after I get done with it. The spreadsheet contains the dates and prices of the "flips", as well as the sellers' names. It is all public records stuff; nobody has bothered to compile and analyze the data until now.

and 'nuther thing more. I got curious about one of the Federal foreclosures I appraised last summer. The house was refinanced in 2005 with a $50,000 mortgage. I appraised the home for $19,000. The bank bought it at the foreclosure sale for $32,000. MLS shows it was then put on the market for $13,900 and came under contract in 6 days. Does that make sense?

The idea of packing up and going to Korea as a teacher of English as a second language is looking more attractive every day.