6.22.26 Industry Advocacy; Class Valuation’s Mark Walser on UAD 3.6; Caring About Inflation

Today’s episode includes the practical realities of how advocacy gets done in the mortgage industry. Plus, Robbie interviews Class Valuation’s Mark Walser on UAD 3.6: stages of panic versus planning, and what lenders can expect in the fall. And we close with a look at why investors and the Fed care about inflation.

Thank you to Equifax. With Equifax's suite of mortgage solutions, mortgage lenders can use trusted, independently verified consumer and financial data and analytics to reduce manual processes, accelerate loan decisions, improve accuracy, manage risk, and enhance the borrower experience from initial application through ongoing loan servicing. 

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 0:02

Welcome to the Chrisman Commentary, Daily Mortgage News Podcast. I'm your host, Robbie Chrisman. Topics on today's episode include advocacy at the state and national levels, why investors in the Fed care about inflation, and my interview with class valuations, Mark Walser on UAD 3.6, the stages of panic versus planning, and what lenders can expect in the fall. Here, take a listen to a little preview. What is appraisal nirvana? What does the future look like? What are we working towards?

Speaker 1 0:33

I think that has a number of answers. You know, and this this part here is speculation. So I would I would tell you, you know, that take take this as an opinion, not necessarily what uh what what class or anyone else thinks is the feature of it. But you know, my my view is that, you know, we you may have seen an announcement recently that we we also have collateral underwriter access now. So uh, you know, class helped pioneer that uh that access for MCs so we can now see what a pro what the lender sees post-review, right? We we can we can actually take a look at the actual reporting behind collateral underwriter and look at the comparables that are driving it. And again, it's not to manipulate an appraisal at all, right? We just want to see the risk items that are being flagged, why and how are they being flagged? We could then clean up the report. You know you talk about AI, we're already deploying it with appraisers in our pre-checks. So, you know, in my C View discussion that I had, before it even gets to us for review, we're actually running class intelligence on the submission the appraiser gives us and telling them, hey, here are some flags, here are things that are wrong, here are some errors, here's things that are questionable that need more commentary. Do you want to fix these things? And then you'll have a much cleaner experience once you submit it. So that's that's an area that it's being used. I think downstream, the other piece, you know, that you could be also potentially looking at is the fact that the data is becoming more homogenized. So the the data we collect in property data collection, right, and all of those things will enable uh faster appraisals as we continue to see appraiser populations impacted. Uh, I think the desktop and hybrid appraisal are really going to come into their own, particularly post-3.6. If you imagine scenarios where the uh, and it's not an imaginary thing that's happening right now, and classes is participating in this, where there are real estate companies that are actually putting class data collection into listings. And as that happens, effectively you've got uh the data that's sitting there in a listing that anybody can use. Any appraiser can use it. Any AMC could potentially use it. It's the photos of the property, it's the floor plan to ANSI, ANSI standard. It is, you know, all of the other pieces that an appraiser typically needs, quality property, and condition, all of those things are available. I think that's personally where I see a lot of it going on the purchase world, where we're just going to be able to give lenders more and more options as it relates to desktop appraisals, use of hybrid, and to really shorten the time it takes to do these reports, especially in rural areas where it currently takes three or four weeks to get an appraisal in some cases. We can really truncate a lot of that and help the lender and the consumer and the borrower have a better experience.

Speaker 3:16

Thanks to Equifax for sponsoring this week's podcast. With Equifax's suite of mortgage solutions, mortgage lenders can use trusted, independently verified consumer and financial data and analytics to reduce manual processes, accelerate loan decisions, improve accuracy, manage risk, and enhance the borrower experience from initial application through ongoing loan servicing. To learn more, visit Equifax.com slash business slash mortgage. The solstice was yesterday, summer has officially begun, and we can look for the daylight in the northern hemisphere to gradually diminish until mid-December. Certainly, congressional legislation will diminish with only about two weeks left in the legislative calendar until the election. Housing policy? Heck, Congress won't touch Freddie and Fanny with a ten-foot poll. Penny Mac has released the latest edition of its Penny Mac Policy Pulse, a newsletter tracking key federal policy developments shaping the housing and broader US economy. You can find that link at Crismancommentary.com. When national or state level organizations engage in advocacy, they don't visit the NAR or home builders or large title companies. They visit state legislators, Congress, or federal regulators. It has become impossible to separate politics from residential lending. Lenders are confronted with regulators, people moving states due to politics, expensive property taxes from local governments, state-specific lender and servicer restrictions, policies and procedures, and document sets that come from agencies under government conservatorship, and lastly interest rates that are higher than they should be due to oil price-induced inflation. If you can be successful in this business by ignoring all of that, congratulations.

unknown 5:14

Mr.

Speaker 5:15

Greenspan famously said that he never received a direct request from a president to cut rates. Policymakers last week raised their inflation forecasts, lowered unemployment expectations, and revealed a more hawkish outlook. Roughly half of the Federal Open Market Committee or FOMC favored higher rates, and Walsh notably declined to submit a dot plot forecast, fueling speculation that the Fed may move away from that form of forward guidance. The fixed income markets that's bonds interpreted the meeting as a hawkish shift, pushing short-term treasury yields sharply higher and increasing expectations that the Fed's next move is more likely to be a rate hike than a cut. While Wars signaled broader institutional changes through the creation of task forces focused on communications, data, inflation, productivity, and jobs. For now, the Fed remains firmly on hold, but Warsh appears focused on laying the intellectual groundwork for a more market-oriented and less prescriptive approach to policy making, potentially marking a meaningful shift in the Fed's long-term operating philosophy rather than its near-term rate outlook. The higher probability of additional rate hikes has contributed to tighter financial conditions and growing stress across credit markets. Equity indexes remain near record highs, and credit spreads have compressed back towards cycle lows. Some investors are beginning to question whether richly valued AI-related stocks can continue to outperform as liquidity fades and borrowing costs remain restrictive. Investors remain focused not only on current oil prices, but also on the risk that energy markets could tighten materially again if geopolitical tensions emerge, helping keep treasury yields contained despite what many would describe as improving geopolitical conditions last week. Concerns are growing that tighter credit conditions, rising distressed debt activity, and slowing liquidity could eventually challenge the resilience of both risk assets and private credit markets. Where he leads business development efforts supporting the credit union division and plays a key role in evangelization and adoption of its leading appraisal modernization solutions to all of its lender clients. It's been a while since we spoke on this podcast. How are you doing? Happy to have you back. What have you been up to?

Speaker 1 7:58

Yeah, no, thanks for thanks for the Where Are They Now uh part of this. I appreciate it. It was it was always fun interacting with you guys back when I was president of In Center Appraisal Management. And uh we we sold the company to class in 2023. So I've been doing a lot of things for class actually during that time, uh, helping launch our credit union division and also being part of our digital team with appraisal modernization and being one of the folks that helped push out and and build the the C View initiative, which is uh probably some of what you heard about, but uh we've been making a splash with that recently. So I'm glad to be on here to talk about it with you.

Speaker 8:33

We will get to C View in a minute. I want to begin this interview in earnest, though, by talking about the big elephant in the room in the appraisal space, and that is UAD 3.6. I would like to think people have a general understanding of it at this point. Essentially, we're we're going to a new uniform appraisal process for 3,600 pages, all of that. There's people are scrambling. November's the implementation timing. But from your perspective, kind of any anything new or worth sharing about it that you think people maybe should should have as a mental note in their brains?

Speaker 1 9:11

Yeah, um, so we've done a number of 3-6 reports here at class, and we've had a good opportunity to get a frontline review of not only how they flow, but you know, what what works and maybe what some of the challenges are. And so the first thing I'll say is just understand that when you are doing a 3-6 report as a lender, however your testing plan unfolds, and we'll talk about that briefly in a sec. Understand that for many appraisers, in fact, most of the time, at least as of now here in June, that 3.6 report that you send for an order through your AMC or through directly to the appraiser, that'll be the first one that they've ever done. So there haven't been a lot of them completed, you know, uh yet, you know, if you look at it holistically in the industry. So a lot of appraisers are ready and have the software capability, but they've never actually done one because no lender AMC has ordered one with them before. So prepare for a little extra time. That would be my first advice, just based on what we've seen. We're we're all used to kind of getting appraisal reports back on the current, I'm gonna call it 2.6 format, Robbie, which is the existing appraisal report format. You're looking at between four to six days usually to get a report back. I would plan for something closer to a week and a half to two weeks on your first ones, because oftentimes the appraiser is using the software for the first time, takes them a little bit longer to figure out how to make that report. And it's a learning curve for them. So be prepared that you might need a little bit more time. So I would recommend doing your first three, six report uh on maybe a refinanced loan or perhaps a purchase loan that has a longer tail on it. You don't need to close in four days and you don't have a realtor partner sort of breathing down everyone's neck trying to figure out how quickly it can come back. You you definitely want to build in a little bit of time. So that's that's one. Two, um, understand that we're still in a position as of this recording here in June, where I believe uh only three out of five major appraiser software providers are ready. There's a couple that are still trying to release their versions of their software or they're in beta. So not every appraiser has access to the report capability. Um, you know, for example, in the in the class world, we see between 60 to 70 percent of appraisers that we have on our panel who have the software and are able to do a 3.6 report. And the other sort of 30% are taking the classes, maybe, or they're in various stages of that, and they also don't have ready software for that. So there are solutions for those appraisers, but it's still very much a learning curve for a lot of them. So be aware of that, that there's a bit of a time crunch there. Does that make sense?

Speaker 11:46

It does. I want to ask you though, kind of off the cuff, why are people putting it off? And maybe the answer is they don't view there to being much benefit to getting started early on it because it's a pain in their mind. And longer term, there's not going to be an advantage of being an early adopter necessarily. Is that true or why are people kind of dragging their feet on this?

Speaker 1 12:11

I think there's a number of factors. I don't think you can blame any one thing. Um, you know, it there is just that natural thing lenders are busy and sometimes they they just you know put these initiatives off until a few months before they're due. And November 2nd is the uh, you know, is actually the submission deadline. So that means realistically, if you're a lender and you want to avoid that wall, the GSEs are advising that you need to be up and running full tilt in 3.6 by 10.1 by October 1. Class is being a bit more aggressive than that and moving clients over the third quarter and and uh obviously trying to be well well ahead of that. The other thing is that, and and I'll be honest, I've heard this from lenders. So uh again, I would just say vet who you're working with in terms of your partnerships. I have heard from lenders that a number of their AMCs and appraisers are telling them, we're not ready, we don't have appraisers who are ready, we just can't do these right now. And so you're you're getting some lenders who are taking that cue and just basically saying, well, okay, then I guess I'll wait until you are. But that's not necessarily the best idea. You still want to have some level of plan and testing. Uh, you want to try to at least do one report and try the process from start to finish because it's more than just is your appraiser ready? Is your LOS technology ready? Are, you know, are are your reviewers and underwriters are they able to review these reports? Have they seen one, right? Have they taken the classes? Uh there's IT considerations. This report's a zip file. It's a.zip file. So many IT departments have banned these zip files. And as we've been doing these in live production and tests with our lenders, we've noticed that. We've we've had a number of lenders who said, yep, I got to go change this because that zip file is being blocked when it gets delivered. So it's a much larger appraisal, right? That's why it's zipped up. So think of it as you know, it has artifacts inside of it. It's the appraisal PDF, it's the appraisal XML, and it's also a photo file, a dedicated photo file with all of these photos that are in the appraisal report. So it's much larger, right? So think about size limits too. I believe the GSEs have uh have put out some guidance that 60 megabytes is kind of the max size for these files. I know some LOS providers have sort of made limits to 50 megabytes in size, you know, for these files. So these are all questions you have to ask operationally as a lender and really vet with your AMC partner, with your LOS and technology providers, and your internal IT department. So there's a lot to do, even before you're actually ready to try to place an order. You want to get on the bandwagon internally and make your plan, have your team talk to your vendors and kind of know how you're going to deploy your first couple of reports.

Speaker 14:50

The phrase you threw out in your first answer of this interview was testing plan. And you got into it a little bit there. But I'm wondering if you could give thoughts on best practices for having a testing plan, implementing the testing plan, feedback on that, and lend a little bit of your expertise to listeners here, please.

Speaker 1 15:06

Absolutely. So as I mentioned, some of the stuff here previously on the tech side, you'll also want to look at the personnel side of this. So the GSEs don't expect you to, you know, cold turkey flip 100% of your volume over to 3.6, you know, on a given day. They're looking at it as start with the plan, be deliberate, deliberative, stage it. It's like a dimmer switch, as some have described it, turn it, turn it up, you know, slowly but steadily. So you'll want to probably align with who are your most senior underwriters and processors, obviously train your LOs and talk to them about the fact this report is changing and put together an internal task force. Much like we have a task force here at class that is dedicated to 3.6 and our client transitions, a lender would want to have a small task force internally too. Maybe your most senior underwriter, your most senior processor, a couple of loan teams staged. You want to identify what are the areas we do the most business in and start there in those counties or MSAs. Make sure you've reached out to your AMCs and other partners and say, can you tell me how many appraisers that you have in our core counties here and in our say our top five counties that are ready to go with 3.6, and therefore, you know, we can pre-stage our first orders. And then have that group of people be your task force. So that processor who's earmarked for this will order the first three six. You have an underwriter who's your most senior one trained, ready to take that file and underwrite it. You've got your AMC and your appraisal partners queued up and ready to go. As soon as that thing comes in, they're able to move through. They're not hunting and pecking and trying to find an appraiser. They've already pre-staged it. That's how you do some success with these reports is planning that first, especially couple, and making sure you have a team internally responsible for it, rather than try to, you know, cold turkey it across your whole organization. Once that group has done a few and has done a number of them and is, you know, laying out the timeline and the process and the learning, you can then extend that to a larger and larger group of people. You can start phase phase staging it and saying, okay, next team, you guys are going to go. Next team, you guys are going to go until you finally have your entire organization transition to 3.6. So that would be my recommendation. And what we've been telling our class partners and customers is to do that sort of crawl walk run with uh a task force internally to start.

Speaker 17:26

What do you see as the role of AI and the advanced review and in general and providing certainty of execution to lenders in the appraisal process?

Speaker 1 17:34

Yeah. So certainty of execution comes in multiple ways. Um, you know, first of all, AI does have some relevance to the topic we just discussed with appraisers. A lot of the appraiser software platforms are implementing or will be implementing levels of AI in there to help appraisers put reports together more quickly, more accurately, and the like. In Class's side, we see certainty of execution and a higher quality appraisal review being the natural outcome of these changes. We're already doing this today. Uh Class has built its own AI for review called Class Intelligence. It has a very powerful automated AI and rule sets built into it. We also have photo and computer vision built into that so that we can look at photos that come through and the AI can make determinations on things that might be missing, health and safety issues, quality and condition. It's it's uh a lot of this was also informed by our actual doing property data collections over the last eight years for hybrids and value acceptance and ACE PDRs. So, you know, we have a ton of that already deployed with our property data collectors who go and scan properties for appraisal, um appraisal data. So all of that sort of rolls in and becomes this new, we call it a review AI. It's applicable to two six appraisals, which are today's reports, and three six reports. And it is the foundation uh, along with our our review teams, of what we do in executing our C View program, which is basically our underwriting engine. So we're we are now uh you know providing all of these lenders uh that are in this program certainty of execution on the majority of their appraisals. So if you were to sort of translate that into what your listeners are looking at for you know, real world how's this affect me? That'll be CU risk score 2.5 or lower. That appraisal that has a collateral underwriter risk score of two and a half and lower classes guaranteeing those appraisals. We are underwriting them from the inception of getting them, delivering them to the lender fully reviewed, and telling the lender, you don't have to review this. You don't have to open it, you don't have to read it. Here is a certificate that has our guarantee and it summarizes the basics of the report, including the value. If the value works for this loan, then approve it and move on. Don't read it, don't open it, don't review it, you don't need to, just do basic loan level checks and move on. That kind of thing is the first of its kind in the industry where we can come and we can say, you don't need to open an appraisal. You know, as you know, Robbie, underwriters are the most expensive, probably part of the process for operations. And underwriters opening an appraisal today, you most of our lenders tell us, you know, it takes about 30 to 60 minutes of time to review an appraisal properly. You know, and that could easily be, you know, between 75 to 100 bucks of cost, just labor cost, that's there. And as you know, when things get busy, they have to go hire more underwriters and people start drowning too. Loans get stuck, appraisals get stuck, you know, you're doing all these revisions back and forth, waiting for appraisers to correct things. So we're cutting all of that out. It's a very large amount of back and forth work that's getting cut out because we're able to deliver certainty on the appraisal quality. And that is what we view as the future of the industry and what we've pioneered here at class.

Speaker 20:53

I certainly wish you the best of luck in that. It's always a pleasure speaking with you. And uh hopefully we do it again soon. Thanks, Mark. Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Rami. Appreciate it. Oil price in Iranian war news has dominated the headlines and overshadowed economic news in terms of moving rates, but this week's economic calendar features the latest personal income and spending data, which is expected to show a normal zero excuse me, nominal, 0.6% increase in personal spending. That gain is likely due to rising prices rather than an actual uptick in consumer demand. The PCE deflator, a key metric for measuring price increases, is forecast to rise 0.5% for the month, pushing the annual inflation rate to over four percent. Behind these higher spending numbers, consumer fundamentals are actually weakening because real disposable income has fallen. The savings rate is hovering near historic lows as households dip into reserves to keep up with rising prices. While overall spending should advance in the second quarter, it will likely do so at an unimpressive pace. It remains to be seen how much longer consumers can sustain this momentum when inflation has outpaced the forecast 0.4% increase in personal income. Highlights from the data front this week include SP Global Manufacturing and Services PMIs, the obviously backward-looking third estimate of Q1 GDP, personal income and spending, PCE and core PCE, made durable goods orders, retail and wholesale inventories, and final June Michigan University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment. Treasury will conduct its quarterly refunding consisting of a $69 billion two-year treasury note auction tomorrow, a $70 billion five-year treasury note auction on Wednesday, and a $44 billion seven-year note auction on Thursday. With nothing of note on today's economic calendar, we begin the week with agency MBS prices worse than Fridays closed by about an eighth, the two-year yielding $4.22, and the 10-year yielding $4.49 after closing. Last holiday shortened week on Thursday at 4.45%. Let's wrap up with a joke and some housekeeping. Easy. Thanks again to Equifax for sponsoring this week's podcast. With Equifax's suite of mortgage solutions, mortgage lenders can use trusted, independently verified consumer and financial data and analytics to reduce manual processes, accelerate loan decisions, improve accuracy, manage risk, and enhance the borrower experience from initial application through ongoing loan servicing.