[FoCHAT] 8/3/07 CHAT: Road Home Appraisal Problems

Fri Aug 3 10:21:51 PDT 2007

Thanks very much KA for sending your important message below to CHAT and then to yahoo groups. As you know, CHAT is working on just this problem of inaccurate appraisals by Road Home Program (RHP) and use of less accurate RHP appraisals in favor of homeowner-supplied full appraisals by a LA cert. appraiser. John Murden, LA cert. appraiser, has been helping us very much with this and has offered the perfect well-precedented solution. It is a matter of convincing RH officials to do the following:

  acknowledge a much more correct, more widely accepted, and less expensive method for resolving controversy about pre-storm values for those who submit LA certified appraisals, 

  do the pre-storm determinations with proper methods and data and share the data with applicants upon request, 

  and be willing to make absolutely needed corrections of inaccuracies like this retroactive, if necessary, after the shortfall is covered. 

  As RHP applicants know, the performance fines that will be leveled on ICF just for slow processing of applications according to yesterday's T-P article will do nothing to help decrease mistakes and unfairness in the RHP. In fact, they are likely to make those problems worse as ICF (the contractor) is encouraged to process quickly without improvement in processing methods and policies to encourage accurate and fair processing.

  For five months, CHAT has been advocating to OCD and LRA (the state agencies running the RHP) for an important part of the solution for ICF getting help with its operations. This is to obtain two in-flight (not stopping their regular business) reviews of their procedures by independent experts who will make recommendations. One review sponsored by LRA, the small one, is supposed to start any day but we are still waiting for it to happen. The other sponsored by OCD, the large one, has been delayed with no light at the end of the tunnel.

  If individuals try to solve their own problems with inaccuracy and unfairness in the RHP themselves, they have much less chance of succeeding than if we work together. 

  Road Home Applicants
  Please take our 3-min survey at http://chatforfairness.org if you have not filled it out after June (we had an earlier survey before then). We would like you to take the survey whether you were satisfied with your RHP application process or not, whether you went to closing or not. We have heard from many of you. Thank you very much. Please let us hear from more of you and spread the word. You may enter information for a friend or neighbor without internet access if they agree.

  If you had any kind of appraisal problem that you can document, please describe it in the bottom open box of the survey. 

  If you had any kind of problem getting requested information from your own files (calculations of % damage to your home, RHP's documentation of how they determined your home's pre-storm value, etc), please describe in the bottom open box of the survey.

  If you are still in Dispute Resolution for more than 4 months (gasp!), please tell us in the survey because 95% of those cases for more than 4 months are supposed to have been settled by the end of last month, July.

  If you have any of the above problems or some other particularly difficult problem with the RHP and are willing to be interviewed by the media, please state it in that bottom box. We know that many of you are reluctant to take surveys and give your name or be interviewed by the media. We have seen no evidence at all of prejudice against any applicant who does so nor against any core CHAT members. 

  If you want to update your information on the survey, please just put "update" after your name in the survey blank for name.

  I also want to thank those of you who are sending important information not related to the survey but to the RHP (like about RHP post-closing house inspections) to our email address chatlra at yahoo.com. Please continue to do so.

  Best wishes and take heart from some encouraging signs in Congress this week of the nation understanding our plight.

  Melanie

  Melanie Ehrlich

  http://chat.thinknola.com  (to join our email network, find out about our meetings, or obtain valuable information, like how to request all your RHP records)

springhillalum <kacorn527 at aol.com> wrote:
          I have learned something interesting about the appraisals being 
done by 
the Road Home. A friend of mine from St. Bernard Parish appealed the 
value which the RH set on his home. He paid for an independent 
appraisal which showed the value of his property to be much higher 
than 
the RH's valuation. He has been going around in circles trying to 
get 
the RH to accept the independent appraisal which is more than 20% 
higher than the Road Home's.

A few days ago he went to one of the help centers and happened to get 
the same worker as he had at his original appt. The RH employee 
showed 
my friend the appraisal which the RH used to value his house 
(although 
he refused to make a copy of it). Two of the "comps" used to 
determine 
the value of his property were not even in his neighborhood! In fact, 
one of them was on the other side of Paris Rd. 

I thought this information would be of value to everyone fighting 
their 
appraisals by the RH. Perhaps this problem of using comps which are 
really NOT comparable is an extensive one.

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