Some spin advocacy as distortion when it comes to our e-Newsletter

We've never made any bones about being on your side – certainly not in the pages of our e-Newsletter. Once a week we try to give you the good news about your profession, where most real estate and broader media focus on the bad. We do this truthfully, diligently, and have our facts straight. We're not new to the appraisal industry – we know how it works. We know what hasn't worked. AVMs haven't worked. Pay-for-play VANs haven't worked. And we say so.

Some say we try to scare you into buying from us. Like when we call another company on funneling some of your money to an AVM provider. We tell you you shouldn't be scared of AVMs – not only can you compete with them, you can run circles around them. We're not trying to scare you, or smear anyone who does things differently. We tell it like it is.

The remainder of this tale will be of little interest to most of you, because it involves an "I said, you said, she said" that always makes people uncomfortable. But the October 11 edition of Appraisal Intelligence, a subscription-based newsletter billing itself as "Real Estate Valuation News and Analysis," devoted its cover story to a piece-by-piece critique of a story of ours in our July 27 edition entitled WaMu to undertake "complete overhaul" of mortgage operations, cut more mortgage jobs by a former Vice President of WaMu.

The critique does not withstand serious scrutiny, and we're confounded as to a reason that squares with journalistic ethics why Appraisal Intelligence would have proceeded this way. Appraisal Intelligence contacted us for a "corporate response" to vague "questioning" of the "validity and credibility" of the story. We asked for specific "questions," and were given quotes to respond to. We did. But none of the specific "questions" about the piece's "validity and credibility" were given to us in advance to respond to. Our response never made it into the article. Not contacting us at all and offering "equal time" after the fact would have been one thing, but we were misled, likely so that the article could end by (truthfully) saying they had "talked to us" and would provide details in their next issue.

No need to wait. If interested, please read our original story, linked above; the Appraisal Intelligence story (we offered to provide you with the full text of the story so you could read it for yourself in its entirety and in context, but Appraisal Intelligence did not take us up on our offer, so only subscribers will be able to read the story linked), and then our blow-by-blow rebuttal to the frankly misleading, confusing and borderline libelous piece.

We doubt very many of you subscribe to Appraisal Intelligence and as we said are uninterested in a "he said, she said" story. That's why we've linked them separately. We do have business partners we work with who may have read the Appraisal Intelligence piece and be left with the impression we slam lenders and companies in our e-Newsletter with no basis in fact, and those are damages, if they materialize, that we'll keep track of. Please, proceed with the links above only if interested, and otherwise, be assured that we know who we're writing for, we know our and your business, and we would never intentionally misrepresent or misstate any fact whatsoever to advance some underhanded agenda.