Today, four years after New York’s then Attorney General Cuomo filed his state’s lawsuit against First American eAppraiseIT (now part of CoreLogic), the New York Court of Appeals (the state’s highest court) heard eAppraiseIT’s appeal of the trial court’s denial of its motion to dismiss. eAppraiseIT’s argument on appeal, as Read more…
Appraisal management companies (AMCs) — and individual appraisers themselves — have avoided the brunt of mortgage-related litigation and losses stemming from the lending crisis. Both AMCs and appraisers have not been forced to defend against 98%+ of the potential liability claims that lenders might have tried to press about allegedly Read more…
The FDIC is now contending that independent contractor appraisers are the legal agents of appraisal management companies (AMCs) in both of its cases against LSI Appraisal and CoreLogic. Based on this contention, the FDIC asserts that the AMCs should be liable for all damages attributable to the alleged negligence of Read more…
As was first predicted on this blog here, the FDIC, as receiver for failed lender Washington Mutual, sued appraisal management company LSI Appraisal and its corporate parent Lender Processing Services for breach of contract and gross negligence on May 9, 2011. The lawsuit relates to hundreds of thousands of appraisals Read more…
In 2011, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has continued to file a high number of lawsuits against real estate appraisers blaming them for loan losses of the failed lenders that the FDIC and other agencies supervised during the mortgage bubble years 2004-2008. Most of the FDIC’s recent lawsuits concern Read more…
In terms of alleged damages, the biggest case pending against any appraisal firm in the United States — actually, I feel safe writing the biggest case ever — is the lawsuit filed in federal court in Idaho by a group of property owners in four luxury developments in Idaho, Montana, Read more…
The following article has been published on readimember.org for LIA-insured appraisers and other members of READI. Liability Risks to Appraisers and AMCs Stemming from the Appraisal Provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act “The slides below are from a presentation by Peter Christensen regarding liability risks to appraisers and AMCs stemming from Read more…
(See updates here and here.) In December, we offered 11 predictions for AMC liability risks in 2011. Three of the predictions were: #1 — several AMCs would be sued by the FDIC, #5 — some AMCs would see their “reps and warrants” come back to bite them, and #11 — Read more…
Flagstar Bank recently appealed two cases to the Ohio Supreme Court that Flagstar lost against appraisers at the trial court level based on Ohio’s statute of limitations. Under Ohio law, the statute of limitations for most professional liability actions like those against appraisers is four years from — basically — Read more…
Note: this post has been updated since it first appeared. Appraiser E&O policies are changing rapidly in the present litigation environment and an appraiser’s policy terms may change from policy year to year. This may be the first year that some appraisers see an FDIC exclusion in the policies they Read more…