“A housing discrimination complaint filed by a Black Indianapolis homeowner alleges that appraisers’ valuations of her home more than doubled after she removed items that identified her race and asked a white male friend to be there during an appraisal,” ABC News reported on Tuesday, May 18, 2021.
“Carlette Duffy and the Fair Housing Center of Central Indiana filed complaints with the federal government, alleging appraisers violated fair housing laws,” ABC News said. “The appraisers, the complaints said, purposely used comparable sale prices that were unfair and racially motivated.”
Duffy was refinancing, not selling, her home. She bought her house in 2017 for $100,000. Since then, home prices have shot up across the country, due to a housing shortage and few listings. But the first two appraisals were $110,000 and $125,000. The third appraisal, where the appraiser was deceived into believing the homeowner is white, came back as $259,000. (See photo below.)
The discrepancies resulted from the first two appraisers comparing her house to homes in distant neighborhoods, while the third appraiser used “comparables” from her own neighborhood. “Comparables” are a term used in the real estate industry to describe the methodology of estimating a home’s market value by researching recent sales of similar nearby properties.
Race-based housing discrimination is illegal under federal law, and could subject them to hefty fines (and this might have implications under local laws for their licenses, too).
Read story here.
