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Comment by jdavis703 | Hacker News Reader

Since when is providing a housing estimate a regulated activity?

This is from the article:

"...the fact that they offer market-value estimates and 'are promoted as a tool for potential buyers to use in assessing [the] market value of a given property,' shows that they meet the definition of an appraisal under state law. Not only should Zillow be licensed to perform appraisals before offering such estimates"

It can be surprising when seemingly innocuous activities are in fact heavily regulated (cf. Stanford needing to remove all their learning videos from their website).

I don't believe the article is correct in the definition of appraisals.

  A valuation or an approximation of value by impartial, properly qualified persons; the process of determining the value of an asset or liability, which entails expert opinion rather than express commercial transactions.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/appraisal

The article doesn't have to be correct about the definition, it's about how Illinois regulations define it.

Why did stanford have to take the videos down?

It wasn't Stanford, it was Berkeley.

UC Berkeley makes course video content unavailable to public https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13768856

Berkeley Removes 20,000 Free Online Videos to Comply with DOJ Ruling https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764

It doesn't look like the did. At least not the ML course https://see.stanford.edu/Course/CS229/47

Still has that blistering audio though, wish somebody would regulate that to a lower volume. :)

OP may have confused Stanford with Berkeley, which was forced to remove thousands of videos because they weren't captioned for the hearing impaired.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13815764

This is a lawyer, who can sue people at very low cost compared to the rest of us.

If this is a regulated activity, it absolutely shouldn't be. This reminds me of the absurd barber regulations.

When the value of your $100000, $200000, $300000, or more home can be greatly affected by a someone else's declared valuation of your home, its how you get regulations.

Surely most regulations are in place because someone at some point in time tried to take advantage of someone, yes?

No.

Then what?

Typical rent seeking behavior that happens during long periods of peace.

Any proof of that?

Source?

this should be. it's a market with few sales at high costs heavily interwinded with the mortgage market.

having a de facto monopoly on what's considered a fair value, rightly or wrongly, opens up bank people and real estate agents to all kind of manipulation.

by manipulating their equation they can help lowball the sales price of an entire area, they can both profit directly out of this, indirectly through stock manipulation and even cause trouble to the whole banking sector devaluing mortgadget properties

the housing sector is very, very delicate.

But how does getting an appraisal license protect bank people and real estate agents? Isn't an appraiser subject to the same moral shortcomings as any regular person?

And only allowing state licensed appraisers to give value estimates does exactly what you are trying to avoid. It creates a state owned monopoly on housing estimates.

Zillow would lose credibility and it would hurt the core of their business if it was found that they company was purposely deceiving people about the value of their homes so that they could directly profit from it. They might also open themselves up to legal repercussions in that case for just plain old fraud as well.

It's easy to defraud one of the parties in a real estate transaction (usually the bank; they have the money) if the other parties, including the appraiser, collude. The appraiser is supposed to be independent, and the license is a stamp of professional ethics.

If a licensed appraiser acts fraudulently, you have grounds to sue their hinders off.

At least since 1989. Take a look at the "Appraiser Qualification Board" section.

https://www.appraisalfoundation.org/imis/TAF/About_Us/TAF_Bo...

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