Appraisal fintech reports spike in use amid Texas storm damage

Appraisers now face a swell of assessment requests for property damage following February’s extreme winter storms and some will employ new tech to handle the influx.

With the severe weather wreaking havoc in housing markets not accustomed to below-freezing temperatures, about 23 million homes or 15% of the overall stock fall in areas of risk, with burst pipes — an average loss of $10,000 — being the most common insurance claim, according to CoreLogic. As insurance and natural disaster mortgage forbearance claims roll in from borrowers, a backlog of demand for appraisal verification will pile up before servicers can take action.

Texas will likely head that demand. On Feb. 20, President Biden designated 77 of the state’s 254 counties as major disaster areas. Even the latest mortgage activity hit a standstill in the state with applications nosediving 40% week-over-week.

“We’ve seen a spike in requests for inspections in Texas as a result of the extreme weather they recently experienced,” said Tony Pistilli, chief appraiser at Computershare Loan Services. “Remote inspections are particularly useful in such circumstances, enabling appraisers quickly and effectively to meet the sudden increase in demand, and modern mobile inspection technology helps provide homeowners, insurers, lenders with confidence in the reliability of desktop valuations and the work that appraisers undertake.”

In turn, appraisers will need to churn through the claims as quickly and accurately as possible. Of course, the ongoing pandemic adds another layer of difficulty and deepens the need for remote appraisal software.

They’ll also need to accomplish this while filtering out fraudulent claims and the use of deepfake technology. Technology that verifies images could potentially counter consumer fraud as it relates to servicing. Image veracity could also help address the Federal Housing Finance Agency’s December request for input on modernizing appraisals in a streamlined, accurate way to ensure higher loan quality and safety for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

One product that promises to verify images, developed by companies in the Content Authenticity Initiative led by Adobe, is being utilized in home valuations by Truepic, a photo and video verification platform.

Users submit photos and videos through the control-capture of the fintech’s interface, eliminating any possibility of alteration. The media is then run through 22 fraud detection and prevention tests within seconds — including timestamps, GPS location and even checking the direction the phone faced while taking the picture — and gets written into blockchain for version control.

“There are currently thousands of apps where you can seamlessly manipulate a photo or the metadata of a photo,” Craig Stack, Truepic founder and co-CEO, said in an interview. “It’s not a big deal if it's a kid playing on Instagram, but a really big deal if an enterprise spends dollars or makes decisions because of that photograph.”

Truepic saw a record surge in mortgage-related volume, with a 500% leap on Feb. 23 compared to its daily average, overwhelmingly driven from the Texas disaster, according to a company representative.

The storms caused servicers a week of interruption and lost productivity, specifically in Texas, making it tough to get in touch with borrowers due to dead phones and closed call centers, said Matthew Tully, chief compliance officer at servicing technology provider Sagent. “Dallas-Fort Worth is a big servicing hub and many of our clients were impacted.”