Veros has announced an update to its appraisal risk scoring tool, VeroSCORE. The updates focus on the complexity of the appraisal assignment and include several new scoring factors within the tool’s credibility score component to help lenders better assess appraisal risk. “Automating appraisal review in a safe and judicious manner requires the ability to understand the overall complexity of an appraisal assignment,” said David Rasmussen, senior vice president of operations for Veros. “Lenders can better mitigate repurchase risk if they can increase their level of confidence that the appraisals they are using to fund loans are defensible. The new capabilities of VeroSCORE are helping lenders get a better handle on the appraisal in the most efficient manner possible.”
Among other enhancements, the new complexity component within VeroSCORE measures the expected difficulty of the appraisal assignment. It does so by analyzing a number of factors within the appraisal report itself in conjunction with external data and analytics.
Appraisals and appraisal review practices are under increasing regulatory scrutiny and there are many problematic factors that contribute to appraisal risk, making the job of a chief risk officer, chief appraiser or chief valuation officer more challenging. VeroSCORE carefully examines factors in the actual report that may result in risk for the lender and factors outside of the report that a reviewer may not be privy to which could ultimately result in risk. In addition to an appraisal risk score, VeroSCORE also includes an overall risk score that takes outside factors into account, including the report’s new data integrity score component.
This data integrity component examines key factors pertaining to the subject property and to the comparables selected by the appraiser, and verifies those factors against qualified external data sources. “In today’s climate, it is surprisingly easy to be misled by data, and that can lead to issues in valuation reliability,” explains Rasmussen. “When we live in such a data-heavy environment and the tools exist to cross-reference for assurances of data integrity, it is to the advantage of both appraiser and lender to use them. VeroSCORE brings needed clarity and confidence, and when a manual review is needed, the report also provides a wealth of useful information from qualified data sources to speed along that review.”
VeroSCORE is designed to run on a fully automated basis when the appraisal report is received from the provider, checking the report for completeness, compliance, credibility and complexity. The resulting report includes a numerical score for each of these factors along with a suggested routing decision and clear messaging correlated to each reviewed field in the appraisal report. When used in conjunction with valuation workflow systems like Veros’ Sapphire, the appraisal is automatically returned to the vendor for correction if the report fails to clear certain hurdles, such as required fields left blank, invalid data, and other problems within lender-set thresholds.
