12.14.21
The FHFA Insights blog published a commentary on December 14 reporting that, as a participant in the Property Appraisal Valuation and Equity (PAVE) taskforce, it had reviewed millions of appraisals by conducting a key-word search and found references to race and ethnicity in the free-form fields including the “Neighborhood Description” field. On further review, many hits were found to be false positives. But FHFA decided to publish some of the more troubling examples, which they feel display appraiser bias regarding neighborhood ethnicity, for “public transparency and to assist others with fair lending compliance.”