We've learned from recent items we've run in our e-Newsletter and in our new monthly print digest edition, as if we didn't already know, that client pressure is the topic of most concern to the greatest number of our readers. We decided to try and quantify the problem with your help. Please take less than two minutes of your time and complete our online survey about client pressure and its consequences. There are only six, "yes" or "no" questions involved, and you will be helping us tell the appraiser's side of the story to the broader media. We'll let you know the results in this space, too.

Many appraisers believe that as interest rates rise and as homebuyers who might not have qualified for a mortgage in a "normal" market but did in the recent boom encounter problems making their payments, the so-called "housing bubble" will burst and appraisers will be blamed for the ensuing spate of foreclosures. We disagree, looking at the manufactured housing lending debacle, which we did last week and seeing that appraisers are part of the solution to that crisis, not its scapegoats. But the argument of appraisers as solution, not problem isn't being made by anybody but us, and we want to get a head start.

Another reason to gather data and report on the pervasiveness of lender pressure is that Automated Valuation Model (AVM) advocates are using the preposterous argument that AVMs are preferable to appraisers because AVMs can't be pressured into inflating values. Dave Biggers, founder and CEO of a la mode, addressed this in a letter to the editor of American Banker in May: The tool isn't the problem or the solution if the user — the broker, loan officer or other lending client — is bent on committing fraud. A spokesperson for Fitch Ratings, the outfit which said it would discount mortgage backed securities where properties were valued by other means than a full appraisal, told American Banker correctly that users can sample a number of different AVMs with widely varying results and simply pick the highest.

In a "sponsored article" in Mortgage Technology, available here, the author falsely argues the following: "Recent research from the October Research Group provides insight into this pivotal question [of how often appraisers succumb to client pressure]. The [data] shows that over half (51%) of all appraisers 'sometimes go along' with the pressure to overstate values."

The accompanying chart (scroll down about two thirds of the way) demonstrates that 51 percent of respondents said that 40 percent or more of their colleagues sometimes go along with pressure to overstate values, in their opinion. Using a respondent's guess as to what percentage of his or her colleagues sometimes cave in to lender pressure to prove that more than half of all appraisers do so is simply a misreading of the data.

No appraiser has ever, in the history of mankind, inflated a value without pressure or coercion. Some see business evaporate, some encounter trouble getting paid when the value was "too low" to make the deal work. Some are doing something about it: they're "firing" clients who pressure them. The goal of our survey is to quantify this as best we can.

Longtime readers of our e-Newsletter will recall that Sen. Kerry's Beacon Hill home was said to be worth $12.8 million by an appraiser contracted by Mellon Bank in December, so we can see where he'd be on board with the idea housing should be more affordable. Recently, Sen. Kerry has proposed specific affordable housing initiatives for military housing "by providing incentives for private developers to build new housing on or near military bases and lease it to military families at a rate consistent with their housing allowances."

For his part, President Bush has hung his hat on a record of record expansion in homeownership, pointing to his signing the American Dream Downpayment Act into law. The Act provides assistance of up to $10,000 or six percent of the purchase price of a first home to buyers a certain level below their area's median income. "If you own something," the President said in June, "you have a vital stake in the future of our country. The more ownership there is in America, the more vitality there is in America, and the more people have a vital stake in the future of this country."

For the sake of fair and balanced reporting, it should be noted that President Bush's current residence would list for about $106 million on the open market.

Critics claim that getting more people with more debt and poorer credit into bigger houses with less money down may temporarily stimulate the economy but could have potentially drastic consequences down the road. But "affordable housing" is almost the "war on drugs" of the 2000s — no political candidate has the will to come out against "affordable housing" initiatives, regardless of how the benefits and costs are balanced.

Whoever wins in November, we're likely to have continuing expansion in homeownership, progressively lax underwriting standards, and — though we hope we're wrong — more foreclosures as overextended homeowners begin to have trouble making payments and find themselves without enough equity to sell out from under their mortgages.