6.10.26 Credit Scoring Versus Pricing; Automax.ai’s Humza Ahmed on Appraisal Technology; CPI Inflation

Today's episode includes a dive into the differences between credit scoring and credit pricing. Plus, Robbie interviews Automax.ai’s Humza Ahmed on how residential property appraisal technology is evolving, the way it's built for UAD 3.6, and what is dramatically reducing turnaround times. And we close by going through the latest CPI inflation figures, which were roughly in-line with expectations.

Thank you to JazzX, the first true end-to-end AI platform built for mortgage. From application to underwriting, JazzX is a new operating model that helps you scale growth, boost productivity, and transform how your team performs.

The Chrisman Commentary is your go-to daily mortgage news podcast, where industry insights meet expert analysis. Hosted by Robbie Chrisman, this podcast delivers the latest updates on mortgage rates, capital markets, and the forces shaping the housing finance landscape. Whether you're a seasoned professional or just looking to stay informed, you'll get clear, concise breakdowns of market trends and economic shifts that impact the mortgage world.

Transcript

Speaker 1 0:03

Welcome to the Chrisman Commentary, Daily Mortgage News Podcast. I'm your host, Robbie Chrisman. Topics on today's episode include credit scoring versus credit pricing, why this foreign relations seesaw is problematic for rates, and my interview with Automaxis.ai's Hamza Ahmed on how residential property appraisal technology is evolving, the way it's built for UAD 3.6, and what is dramatically reducing turnaround time. Here, take a listen to a little preview.

Speaker 2 0:32

What does the appraiser or appraisal process of the future look like to you?

Speaker 0:39

To me, it's a much smaller population of appraisers, likely, doing a much higher percentage of the actual volume. I think every single appraisal will start with a property data collection. And what we'll what we'll have is we'll have every single lender with a very good waterfall set up within their appraisal process. What that means is depending on the risk rating of a specific property, we will not have full appraisals being required on every single property and being done really on a majority of properties. You'll have properties either getting waived outright, where your LTV or loan file and the amount of the house just allows you to get an instantaneous waiver, which people are used to using today. Then right after that waiver category, the next category over to me is going to be data collection plus waiver or data collection plus appraisal. This will make up almost everything from that point onwards. And what I mean by that is you make data collection as easy as possible to get the inspection data of an actual property, to send in a human being or have the homeowner themselves be able to collect really accurate property data on the condition, the quality, the features of the home, and use that to get a waiver done instantly, or use that to get a hybrid appraisal done within 24 hours as well. So to me, you should have 85 to 90% of all appraisals being done really within 24 hours or almost instantly for lenders. And a very small percentage of loans actually requiring you to go through the five to seven day process that people are going through today with AMCs.

Speaker 2 2:09

Thanks to this week's podcast sponsor, Jazz X, the first true end-to-end AI platform built for mortgage. From application to underwriting, Jazz X is a new operating model that helps you scale growth, boost productivity, and transform how your team performs. To learn more, visit jazzx.ai.

Speaker 1 2:29

Most everyone knows that the GSEs, that's Freddie and Fanny, don't use credit scores for loan approval. They use it for pricing. The GSEs have created their own scoring system, and it's just the investors that utilize that score. It takes a while to test the impact of credit scores on defaults, delinquencies, pricing, and prepayment speeds, and staff in our business interested in any agency pilot programs about credit are encouraged to reach out to their Fanny or Freddie representatives. If you have a client in the market to buy a home, you certainly welcome lower prices and lower rates. Although if they're also selling a home, you want to get the best possible price on that. But higher prices impact affordability much more than rates. Realtor.com estimates that one of two things would need to happen for monthly mortgage payments to fall back to 2019 levels. Household incomes would need to rise 56%, or mortgage rates would need to fall to 2.65%. In other words, it's not happening anytime soon. While the week opened with markets finding some relief as signs of de-escalation between Iran and Israel pushed oil prices back down, easing immediate inflation concerns and helping contain upward pressure on bond yields. Yesterday saw prospects for a near-term peace agreement between the U.S., Israel, and Iran deteriorate sharply after President Trump blamed Iran for the reported downing of a U.S. helicopter and authorized a new round of U.S. strikes on Iranian targets. Flip a coin to determine what's next. Domestically, the U.S. Treasury launched this week's note and bond auction slate with a well-received three-year note auction, especially so given the overall volatility across capital markets. Separately, an index of U.S. small business optimism fell in May to the lowest level since 2024, erasing almost all the gains seen since President Trump's 2024 re-election. Existing home sales increased 3.2% in May to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4.17 million units, the strongest pace since December. As modest improvements in affordability, driven by lower mortgage rates relative to a year ago and income growth that has outpaced home price appreciation, help support demand. Despite the monthly gain, transaction activity remains near post-financial crisis lows, reflecting ongoing structural challenges. Years of underbuilding combined with lock-in effect from low rates created by the Federal Reserve's era of quantitative easing, and large-scale mortgage-backed securities purchases, have left a persistent shortage of existing home inventory relative to population and household growth. This has limited market turnover, intensified competition for available properties, and contributed to existing home prices at times rivaling or exceeding those of new construction. Despite weaker business sentiment and persistent concerns surrounding geopolitical risk and economic uncertainty, the big story out there remains the remarkable resilience of the U.S. economy. Labor markets continue to generate solid employment gains, consumer spending has remained constructive, and overall economic activity has proven far more durable than many anticipated in the face of elevated energy prices and external shocks. The resilience has investors moving beyond discussions of when the Federal Reserve might begin cutting rates, and instead contemplating whether, still not necessarily when, inflationary pressures could ultimately necessitate additional tightening. Policymakers are still expected to leave rates unchanged in the near term, though markets are increasingly embracing a higher for longer framework, reflecting the view that monetary policy may already be near neutral and that sustained economic strength could complicate the path back to the Fed's inflation target. Obviously, this calculus could quickly change based on energy prices, labor market conditions, financial performance, and geopolitical developments. For today's interview, I'm very excited to welcome to the show Automax.ai's Hamza Ahmed to talk about how residential property appraisal technology is evolving, the way it's built for UAD 3.6, and what is dramatically reducing turnaround times. He's founder and CEO of Automax.ai, which is an AI assistant for real estate appraisers that helps them save time and money by automating the property valuation process.

Speaker 2 6:31

It was a very pleasant surprise the first time I met you because there's not a ton of us younger people in the industry, although that's picking up for sure. And that's something that's probably on the forefront of your mind a lot because you you started this company and people are going, hey, who's this guy? Where'd he come from? That sort of thing. And and so maybe let's start the interview there with your background and how you got into the industry. And and uh I I believe it has something to do with your family business, but I'll I'll I'll give you the floor.

Speaker 7:00

Yeah, 100%. Thanks for thanks for having me, Robbie. Uh I have a very unconventional background and sorry into mortgage. Uh, I started off as my my family has been in the appraisal industry for the past, I don't know, as long as I can remember. Back in back in the 60s is when my grandpa first started appraising. So he started our family appraisal firm. And then my dad and mom's generation all got into it. So all my aunts and uncles became appraisers, and then my generation started getting into it. And so a ton of my cousins went and became appraisers themselves as well, just growing the family firm or growing and starting their own firms from wherever they're settling down. So my first instinct was to go and become a trainee appraiser myself and do all the courses and go and get ready. And I just hated it. I did not want to be an appraiser for a living. And so I did the courses and I'm a trainee, and then I just quit. Uh, I was always growing up very technical in nature and actually did a ton of work in like aerospace and and and you know, building satellites and back in Canada and doing tons of other, you know, super nerdy technical stuff all the time. Uh and so as soon as it got time for me to go to college, I chose to go and do software engineering and study specifically machine learning and AI, which was the big, booming, super interesting to thing to do uh back at that time. And it was just before you know Chat GPT had come out or any of this stuff was really out there. And so it was very niche still to be able to put your put your feet into and go and learn about. And I was hooked by the technology. I spent a couple of years doing machine learning research after that as well. I was working at, did some work with OpenAI, with some other labs doing research on training these very large, large language models that we're using for all of our amazing AI applications that we have today. And my foray back into appraisals actually started as just building sort of internal tools for our appraisal firm. Uh our appraisal firm was absolutely horrible a couple of years ago in terms of how the actual workflow worked of how data moved from one place to another. We had an offshore team that would type up reports in the Philippines. We had things going through a hundred different interfaces before any report used to get done, you know, five days on average for turn time on any report that we were completing. Uh, and so to be honest, it kind of just came from I was visiting a bunch of my cousins and they asked me, Hamza, what are you working on? And I told them, oh, there's a bunch of AI research I'm doing. And they asked me, well, we have this team in the Philippines who are sitting here writing reports all day. Could you do something about that? And so that was the first real tool that I had built for appraisals was just to automate a bit of the report writing piece. Uh and they just loved it so much that they asked me, Hamza, well, we have all this other super boring, menial parts of the appraisal workflow. Can you start building tech in all these different compartments? And that's really the birth of Automax, or sort of the first version of Automax, I should say, as well, because it's very different today from what it was back then. But uh, I started off building tech now for every single part of the appraisal workflow. So we built tech to automate some of the data analysis and we built tech to make moving data from MLS easier. We built tech to make the inspection faster. And bit by bit by bit, we had this kind of end-to-end tech product that we call appraisal copilot that we launched first in Canada for gaining appraisers, then down here in the US, that helped appraisers to automate basically their entire appraisal process in terms of the time it was taking. The average time it took an appraiser, and probably that takes an appraiser today, even to do an appraisal start to end, uh, is on average usually around 10 hours from when they get their actual appraisal coming in, their order coming in to submitting it back, which ends up spanning usually three-ish days when it comes to turn time for a lender. On our platform, the average time it takes an appraiser to do the entire process start to end is 40 minutes. These appraisers are now able to do things way faster. We built that tech, uh, and then January of this year, we realized we don't actually want to still keep selling the tech or being an appraisal service provider. And it was as a result of, or we want to stop selling just the tech behind the actual appraisal and try and create more value upstream for lenders. One of the biggest issues that appraisers have, or the appraisal industry as a whole, one of the biggest issues that it faces is a workflow issue, which is how the AMCs today fit into the actual business model. Most lenders in the country today, they do only two things for their appraisals. They'll either get an appraisal waiver or they'll do a majority of their volume as conventional full appraisals through an AMC, which basically means they go to AMC A, B, or C. That AMC goes and finds an appraiser, takes two days matching an appraiser to accept the order. That appraiser then spends five days scheduling in an inspection, driving to the property, actually doing the inspection. And then we're waiting three to five days after that for the appraiser to complete the report, submit it back before your underwriting team will go back and give reviews and have it take even longer as a process. So the average turn time today is anywhere from you know five to seven days plus on every single appraisal. And a lot of that is just a workflow problem, having to go through these existing AMCs and go through all the scheduling. So what we ended up launching in January of this year was a hybrid and desktop appraisal model. Basically, it's a model for lenders today to leverage what Fanny and Freddie have called appraisal modernization. It's all these alternative products that got introduced that allow the appraisal to happen without the appraiser themselves having to go into the property. So today, what we do is we for over 85% of conventional mortgage loans, we're able to provide appraisals that are done within 24 hours, where we provide a desktop or a hybrid appraisal product, which basically means someone else, maybe the homeowner or maybe a third-party data collector, will go into the property ahead of time to go and do that inspection. And immediately after you'll have the appraisal report completed and submitted to you. And we do that nationwide. And so we allow lenders to really help make that transition over uh to doing things in a much more streamlined manner.

Speaker 2 12:40

I applaud you for taking the problem on head on, because one of my best friends is an appraiser, my ex is an appraiser, was an appraiser, and there's this like there's this frustration surrounding the whole process. And the appraisal industry itself is going through a little bit of an existential crisis where they say we need more young people. And young people are going, well, I don't want to do the you know 75 or 100 or 150 hours of qualifying education, I don't want to have to go get a license, I don't want to work under a certified supervisor to log like of you know 2,000 or 3,000 hours before passing a license. There's all these problems with it, and so it makes sense that the appraisal industry is ripe for some sort of reckoning or revolution. And I'm wondering what it's been like for you seeing it firsthand and just how that gives you an innate understanding of where it can be better and how you see it kind of progressing forward from here as a result of stuff that you're working on or others are working on.

Speaker 13:36

Yeah, it's been it's been crazy. I mean, there's a lot of frustration that's just been in the industry for a while now on both the appraiser side, facing tons of frustration, as well as like the lender side. Both of them, I feel like, have some of the similar frustrations, but they come from different places as well. For example, on the appraiser side, one of the biggest pieces has been sort of deep hatred for the existing AMC model. You know, it's surprising just how many appraisers really hate working with your average AMC out there, just as a result of the workflow for them, right? The workflow has been so convoluted with so many steps and so much involved in the average client that they're working with that it has to take them so many hours to make so little money. Because what they end up doing is they only end up making 40, 50% of the fee cut because the AMC is taking the remaining amount. And so they're actually only making 200 bucks on several days of work that they're putting into this actual process as well. And there's been tons of frustration. And again, part of this comes from just the very aging population, as you mentioned in the appraisal industry as well. I think the average age last time I checked was somewhere around 56 years old, was the median of appraisers in the country. Uh, and so it's led to a very kind of stagnant process where it really hasn't changed. But most appraisers today are doing the appraisal really the same way that they probably had done it 30 years ago when they had first started appraising. The industry, unfortunately, has changed a lot, or probably fortunately has changed a lot since then as well. And so expectations from the lender side have really shifted. Where I would say it's more competitive today than it really has been in a very, very long time. And so lenders are caring about differentiation with doing faster time to closing and lower cost of borrower and driving these things to be as efficient as possible. And really just hadn't been met from the other side, from the appraiser side, because there was no motivation for them to do more and more work for less and less pay with the existing model. So part of our goal here is actually also to give our appraisers a better experience. Where appraisers who work with us today, uh, our staff and panel appraisers across the country, they on average will make much more money, almost double the amount of money that they would make working with a typical AMC, not because their fees on each order are significantly more. In fact, the fees on each order are typically less because they're doing a hybrid or desktop appraisal, but because they can now do them in an hour or less. They're really spending all of their time on purely that analysis, that analytical thinking that makes them an appraiser of going down and figuring out what is actually contributing to value and what isn't contributing to value, not wasting time on all the other menial tasks that are there within the actual process as well.

Speaker 2 16:10

There's kind of the school of thought out there, especially in the mortgage industry with technology. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And I'm I'm wondering kind of the pushback you've received and how you've gotten past some of those hurdles.

Speaker 16:24

Yeah, good question. There's a couple things, right, that are that are always tough when you're trying out a different model. Uh so appraisal modernization, these hybrid industrial appraisals, these have been around for a while. This is not, this is kind of not novel as a 2026 innovation. Shiny and Freddy launched them several years ago. And some of the lenders that tried them actually didn't have great experiences because of a lot of lots of things that were done not so well. For example, there was a lot of escalations where orders were being ordered through a hybrid, and now they had they went through some flag, some number change in the loan, and now you have to escalate it. And now you're three days behind on your loan. Or the actual appraisal being ordered and only the inspection being ordered after intent to proceed, which means you still have to wait several days for scheduling and it's being done by you know bad data collectors that lead to data and issues being missing. So I feel like there's been tons of skepticism around the actual product and around, you know, what can we do with hybrids and what can we do with desktops? To me, one of the biggest resolutions or the one of the biggest ways to get around skepticism was just making it so easy for people to try themselves. One of the very first things that we'll do with a lot of lenders are onboarding is we'd we give them our mobile app to take a scan of their own house and see if they can mess it up or not, and how easy it is for them to be able to walk through and actually collect that data up front as well, right? And I so I would say there's a big lack of education in the industry around what the hybrid and the desktop can do today. The hybrid and desktop today are very different than what they were back in 2021. Fanny and Freddie last year in the selling guide in June of last year made the hybrid actually eligible for over 85% of conventional work transactions. So a vast majority of conventional transactions can actually now be done on the hybrid. And the other big pushback that I'll say that we've received is people being very reluctant to make the switch over to UAD 3.6, which I know we haven't talked too much about just yet, but that's really the big, you know, rocking the boat moment right now, which is happening in the industry. And it has everyone sort of just paused, waiting to see who will make the first move. And so most lenders have chosen not to make the first move just yet.

Speaker 2 18:21

Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up. That is the big elephant in the room, and I did want to or I do want to discuss that. I mean, it's we could have an hour-long discussion on it, but uh let's kind of break into a couple couple parts here for the sake of this question. The latest around it, because everyone knows that it's coming up in November when when it's it's being fully implemented. What you've heard companies are doing, uh then I believe you have a product launcher release to share with us as well.

Speaker 18:46

First of all, just quick primer on UAD 3.6 for everyone who doesn't know. 3.6 is the GSC is taking the appraisal forms of today, which there's 10, 15 different different four uh templates and deprecating all those existing forms and introducing a brand new appraisal form, which is called the UAD 3.6 form. So it's not meant to be called a form, it's meant to be called an a new report. It has 3,600 fields, where the average report today has around 700 fields. So there's a much longer form. As a result, the workflow for the appraiser is changing. I mentioned how appraisers have bargedly been appraising the same way for the last 30 years. They're used to those forms. And more than them being used to the form, their softwares have been the same for actually completing those forms. And all those softwares that they've been using to complete those appraisal reports now no longer work or have to basically be broken down and rebuilt from scratch to go and actually allow them to complete these new forms. And so the industry is ready for uh a little bit of a shakeup when it comes to the appraisals. We go around and we do tons of events where we're teaching appraisers about 3.6 or we're hosting webinars or things. It seems like the tentative numbers is about 20% of the appraiser population wants to straight up retire from lending work with the coming of 3.6, where they just don't want to deal with such a massive change at 65 years old of having done the entire process the same way their whole life to go and rip that up and do it differently. Today in the industry, I would say less than 1% of the appraisers in the country have actually done a 3.6 appraisal report so far. So there really is not an awful lot of volume already having moved over towards 3.6. And one of the issues is that the lenders really don't want to switch over because they need enough appraisers ready to actually do the appraisal as well. So they don't just build up a bottleneck. And the appraisers really don't want to switch over because there's no lenders giving them orders. And so it doesn't make sense for them to go and spend the time to learn it if they're not going to get paid for it. So we're sort of at this impasse where the lenders know they need to switch. November's coming up, you know, loans that get originated towards the end of summer need to start being on 3.6, but they don't want to make the switch and fall behind their competitors, and the appraisers don't want to make the switch and also lose out on money that they could be making today as well. So it's really put the inner screen in a bit of a pickle where ultimately what happens is if it keeps up getting delayed and delayed and delayed and no one ends up switching. We end up in a crisis later this year or next year, if whenever we have a rate cut, uh, where now we have tons and tons of volume coming in and our appraisal turntimes are a month on average. And we have 2021 scenes all over again happening in the industry. So our approach to 3.6 has been uh very different. Our approach has been to be uh an appraisal provider that actually builds the software to do 3.6 in-house. So we we spent the last eight months working with Fannie Freddy to build out software that is able to do the 3.6 report even faster than appraisers can do the 2.6. So today's appraisal reports themselves in-house. So what we actually do for UAD36 is appraisers use our product the exact same way that they used to use their product on the existing form. So it's actually a learning curve of zero additional things, really, that they have to learn to be able to do a 3.6 appraisal or very few additional flags and pieces that they have to learn. And so we're able to now basically add that 3.6 product onto our existing hybrid desktop appraisals to provide it in the exact same. Return time. Now actually we can make it even better of a product for lenders on average, where now you're able to do a 24-hour appraisal where you're getting back this hybrid desktop, hybrid or desktop appraisal on 85% of your transactions for UAD3. And how you actually do QC on these reports. One of the biggest things that lenders right now are trying to figure out with this report is we have all these new fields. How are we going to review it? Our reviewers have no idea how to go through and actually read and review this form. But data and analytics tools and especially AI is so good at dealing with structured format of the new report that I think that the quality that we're going to see in the industry is going to continue getting better and better as it is a lot.

Speaker 2 22:41

Before I let you go, any final thoughts? And you can kind of conclude that with best places to reach out for next steps and that sort of thing. But just in general, you know, things people should be thinking about after hearing our conversation today.

Speaker 22:53

Yeah, I think that a lot of people are putting off the problem of the appraisals as when it's when it's number one on our plate, when it's breaking the pipeline, when it's absolutely at the top is when we're going to go and think about it and change and do anything on 3.6. One of the things that I think I want people to really take home with them is that it is new. Because it's new, there's a lot of change management. There's a lot of mistakes that you'll make as you're figuring it out. And what that means is the people that are taking time to make it a priority today and tackle these things today when other people are not taking the leap to go and do so are really the ones who are setting themselves up best for when the market turns, for when we have the appraisal all of a sudden as the largest bottleneck in the actual closing process. And so I would really encourage people to learn as much as they can about the change that's happening, educate themselves, and go and actually take initiatives to prepare themselves for what's coming. Because there is there is a storm coming in the industry now when it comes to 3.6. And for reaching out, feel free, you can uh find myself on automacs.ai. And so you know, www.automax.ai are are happy to get my email or anything else as well.

Speaker 2 23:58

It's funny to me that parts of the process a lot of companies I speak with on this podcast are focused on disrupting because the appraisal space is one of the ones that causes the most frustration and takes the longest in holding things up. And so I applaud you for uh taking the problem on head on, as I said at the beginning here. I wish you the best of luck and I'm sure we'll speak again soon. So, Hamza, thank you very much.

Speaker 24:19

Likewise, thanks so much.

Speaker 1 24:23

Today's economic calendar kicked off with mortgage applications increasing 10.8% from one week earlier, according to data from the Mortgage Bankers Association's weekly mortgage applications survey. Last week's results included an adjustment for the Memorial Day holiday. We've also received May consumer prices, which were up 0.6% month over month and 3.8% year over year, with core up 0.4% month over month and 2.8% year over year. These are all roughly in line with what was expected. Later today brings the May Treasury budget and an auction of $39 billion of 10-year notes. We begin the day with agency MBS prices, little change from Tuesday's close, the two-year yielding 4.13, and the 10-year yielding 4.54% after closing yesterday at 4.53%. Let's wrap up with a joke and some housekeeping. An old nun who was living in a convent next to a construction site noticed the coarse language of the workers and decided to spend some time with them to correct their ways. She decided she'd take her lunch, sit with the workers, and talk with them. She put her sandwich in a brown bag and walked over to the spot where the men were eating. She walked up to the group and with a big smile said, Do any of you men know Jesus Christ? They shook their heads and looked at each other very confused. One of the workers looked up in the steelworks and yelled out, Hey, anybody up there know Jesus Christ? One of the steel workers yelled out, Why? The worker yelled back, Cause his wife's here with his lunch.

Speaker 2 26:00

Thanks again to Jazz X, the first true end-to-end AI platform built for mortgage. From application underwriting, Jazz X is a new operating model that helps you scale bro. Jazz X is a new operating model that helps you scale growth, boost productivity, and transform how your team performs. To learn more, visit jazzx.ai.