A new lawsuit filed in Florida state court challenges the appraisal-related fees charged by residential appraisal management companies (AMCs) as deceptive under Florida consumer protection laws. The complaint names two AMCs and one of the country’s biggest residential lenders as defendants. It seeks damages on behalf of a class of Florida borrowers who paid fees charged by the AMCs since 2021, alleging, in part, that “[w]hile a borrower may pay an appraisal fee ranging from $450 to over $1,000, the AMCs pay the appraiser only a fraction of this fee, deceptively keeping the remainder for themselves.”
The complaint further alleges that “Defendants’ deception is particularly problematic because the typical dynamics of a free market are not present to keep the price competitive. In this context, the lender picks the AMC, but the lender does not pay the AMC – the borrower is stuck to pay the AMC the lender contracts with, without the ability to select an AMC or negotiate the AMC’s fees.”
To the extent that the case is challenging the lack of separation when appraiser and AMC charges are lumped together in borrower disclosures, a challenge to such legal claims has been that the regulatory guidance from the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau expressly permits bundling the charges. In particular, in 2013, when explaining its Final Rule for TRID, the CFPB wrote: “Several national trade association commenters representing real property appraisers, as well as a number of individual appraiser commenters, stated that any charge for an appraisal management company (AMC) should be required to be separately itemized in § 1026.37(f)(2). As noted in the Bureau’s proposal, section 1475 of the Dodd-Frank Act permits the optional disclosure of the charges made by an AMC, but does not require separate itemization. See 77 FR 51116, 51134 (August 23, 2012).” Accordingly, the CFPB declined to add such a requirement to its Final Rule. A 2016 bill (HR 3619) that would have changed the law did not move forward. Given that the CFPB contemplated the bundling of AMC and appraiser fees as acceptable, it may be difficult to portray the bundling as a deception in the way that the plaintiff is seeking to do.
With respect to the alleged liability of the AMCs specifically, another challenge is that it is lenders, not AMCs, who determine whether to pass AMC charges on to borrowers and who determine the manner in which such charges are disclosed.
It will be interesting to see how the arguments around these issues unfold in this and a similar case pending in California.
Here is a link to the complaint: https://www.valuationlegal.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/Arnold-v.-Appraisal-Nation-AMC-Links-United-Wholesale-Mortgage-Complaint-12-16-25-copy.pdf
