America's Over-Valued Real Estate

Appraisers by nature tend to be a bit skeptical about home values and we should be. As former HUD Secretary Andrew Cuomo said at the January a la mode Winter Convention "Appraisers are the cornerstone of the entire [mortgage] process". Click to watch the video. He learned as head of HUD that the health of the housing sector depended on two things:

• Americans' confidence in the broader economy, and their trust in the home buying and mortgage process.
• Appraisers deployed to protect the integrity of the mortgage lending process are absolutely essential to the latter.

So, ARE there a lot of homes in America that are "Overvalued"?

You can sure have some fun at the America's Overvalued Real Estate blog finding out. The AORE blog has lots of examples (with pictures) of homes across the USA that YOU can be the judge. Here's just a snippit from one of the posts regarding room sizes:

Can anyone explain this passage in the write-up? "Buyer to verify 3rd bedroom, many small room". Apart from the fact that the sentence is grammatically deficient, it seems to suggest that the realtor and the seller can't agree whether one of the rooms is, in fact, bedroom. So how would that conversation go:

• Realtor: "Sir, I really don't think that we can consider this as a room, it is a cupboard"
• Seller: "No it is not. You can easily sleep a child in there"
• Realtor: "Only if the child could sleep standing up. Perhaps, we should leave it to the buyer to decide whether it is a bedroom or not".