Home appraisals are produced for millions of residential mortgage transactions each year. In addition to preventing fraudulent transactions, an important benefit of appraisals when they report a value below the contract price is that they help borrowers renegotiate prices with sellers. However, appraised values are rarely below the purchase contract price: Some 30% of appraisals in our sample are exactly at the home price (with less than 10% of them below it). We construct a simple but intuitive model to explain how appraisers’ incentives within the institutional framework that governs mortgage lending lead to information loss in appraisals (i.e., appraisals set equal to the contract price). We also present new empirical findings relevant to the issue of appraisal accuracy, based on analysis of appraisal and contract price data and analysis of mortgage default patterns. One new finding—that the frequency of appraisal equal to contract price increases at the loan‐to‐value boundaries (notches) typical of mortgage pricing schedules—is, in fact, implied by our model. In addition, consistent with information loss or, more broadly, with the view that appraisals often artificially confirm the contract price, we find that mortgages with appraised value equal to the contract price are more likely to default.

中文翻译：

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评估购房评估

每年针对数百万个住宅抵押交易进行房屋评估。除了防止欺诈性交易外，评估报告的价值低于合同价格时，评估的一个重要好处是它们可以帮助借款人与卖方重新协商价格。但是，评估价值很少低于购买合同的价格：我们样本中约30％的评估完全以房屋价格为准（其中不到10％低于房价）。我们构建了一个简单而直观的模型，以解释评估抵押贷款的制度框架内评估者的激励机制如何导致评估中信息的损失（即，评估设置为等于合同价格）。我们还提出了与评估准确性问题相关的新的经验发现，基于评估和合同价格数据的分析以及抵押违约模式的分析。实际上，我们的模型暗含了一项新发现-评估频率等于合同价格在按揭定价时间表所特有的贷款与价值边界（缺口）处增加。此外，与信息丢失一致，或更广泛地说，由于评估通常是人为地确定合同价格，因此我们发现，评估价值等于合同价格的抵押贷款更容易违约。