Fire Appraiser

  This was a situation in which a hard money lender called me in for a second opinion about an appraisal of a historic building in Sutter County, California.  The building was vacant but the appraiser used the assumption that it would reach full occupancy in one month.  Naturally, when I confront a vacant building, I call the city to ask if it has a Certificate of Occupancy. Not only was there no certificate of occupancy, it had expired building permits to correct previous fire damage.  Then I consulted the media and quickly found a photo of the building actually on fire: So either the appraiser was negligent or perhaps even participating in a loan fraud.

  The denuded hillsides have created flash floods and rock slides   Living in California for the last 37 years, I have witnessed several wildfires and sometimes find myself traveling to affected areas.    Los Angeles County experienced unprecedented wildfires last month (January 2025), and I was able to see the Eaton fire from my home in Los Angeles, just as I remember watching the same area burn back in the mid-1990s. The Los Angeles County Assessor is working on assessed value reductions for as many as 19,000 properties.  These “decline-in-value assessments” will be automatic, but interestingly enough, the Assessor said that these declines in value will only apply to the “Improved Values” of the affected properties, not the land values. This presumes that land cannot burn down or be devalued by a fire because land is so permanent. In many cases, in flat urban neighborhoods of California, if a house burns down it can be redeveloped with a more valuable one...