Dave Towne: Fee and Copyright Comments In Real Estate Appraiser Reports

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Appraisers…….

Merry Christmas! (yes…I’m in the ‘office’…no rest for the weary!)

Aspects of report content concerning fee paid to the appraiser, and copyrighting, have been distributed and discussed in various places over a number of months.

Effective 2/15/10 (delayed from 1/01/10 in ML 2009-28), FHA says appraisers can state the fee they have been (or will be) paid in the report. However, I have not seen any assignment orders from FHA or other clients that prevent such a statement, at any time. [Some clients I don’t work for may do this, which is why FHA has implemented this new policy.] So I have decided to include this info in my reports.

Secondly, the issue of copyright to protect original work produced by an appraiser has been discussed. Most scholars agree any original work (report) produced by anyone is ‘copyrighted’ at the time of creation. But most also agree that public information we use which is available from legitimate public sources is not part of that right. But I have decided to include a Copyright statement also. The work does not have to be ‘registered’ in order to be considered Copyrighted … the mere fact that you produced the work and make it available to others means it already qualifies as a © Copyright document … but you should so state as such in the report. [Registering gives additional legal and financial protections, but also costs a fee to have done.]

Here’s how I’ve done these statements:

See attached Supplemental Addendum for additional information. Client has agreed to pay fee of $ to the appraiser for this report, which may be less than the Borrower paid to the Lender or agent of Lender. Entire contents of report Copyright (c) by [use your name] except for exact public information used and obtained from public information sources.

This paragraph is in the comment section on Page 3 of the Fannie/Freddie report forms in my reports, which has other CYA commentary. This paragraph is between two other paragraphs. The intent is not to make it very prominent, but also not to ‘hide’ it either. If you like this idea, you may use the info as written, or modify it if you so choose.

May you have a ‘productive’ 2010!

Dave Towne

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