Connecting the GSEs’ Reporting Forms with Highest and Best Use – What This All Means

Now’s the time to learn what this all means.  There is so much to know!  What you’re going to find in this eBook are connections.  Really!  Highest and Best Use, the 1004 reporting form, and a non-misleading appraisal report all fit together into a unified whole.  It is likely you’ve never heard this before.  That’s alright.  This eBook will help you overcome some of the stuff they failed to teach you in appraisal school.

What all this means is that, as you do your analyses and reach your conclusions, you’ll realize these analyses and conclusions are not individual factoids.  They are bricks in a road leading the client to a credible value opinion.  This road, built of facts, adjustments, conclusions, and your training and experience should lead the client exactly where you want the client to go.  And where is that?  From the general data on the top of page one to your final value conclusion on the bottom of page two.  Unfortunately, the GSEs have designed the 1004 form (as well as the other reporting forms) to do a lousy job of this.  Let’s give them the least amount of ammunition to shoot at us.

So you know what all this means is that the data in the report must be internally consistent.  For example, on top of page two it is internally inconsistent to say there were 95 comparable sales then, later in the report, claim there was a shortage of comparables.   Either there were 95 comparable sales, or there was a shortage of comparable sales.  Logically, there cannot be both.