CBS Evening News On Appraisal Fraud: The Corrupt Drove The Good Out Of Business

The CBS News with Katie Couric reports:

• The crash of the real estate market is a true national crisis. But if the right people had looked hard enough, they might have seen it coming a mile away. A lot of home appraisers did. They knew the whole market was being built on a house of cards. And they've been raising red flags for years but nobody seemed to be listening.

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• [T]he whole works got messed up when, appraisers say, lenders and realtors started telling them what value to hit ahead of time. If appraisers wanted an appraisal job, they'd have to guarantee the appraisal in advance ... often sight unseen. That's against the law in almost every state, according to appraisers, but nobody was cracking down on it. Many appraisers found that when they wouldn't agree to an inflated appraisal, they wouldn't get work. Some went along with it. Others didn't and went out of business. And the value of real estate kept going up and up and up.

For more, see:

• Houses Of Cards And Hot Potatoes,
• The Home Appraisal Numbers Game (Home Appraisers Tell CBS News They Were Told To Value Homes High — Putting Banks, Homeowners At Risk) (read story) (watch video).