Artificial intelligence is making the appraisal space, which has been marred by instances of bias, more transparent.
According to Kenon Chen, executive vice president of strategy and growth at Clear Capital, his company is using machine learning and other AI tools to attain fairer assessments of properties.
“[We’re] trying to solve a national problem, but also make it accurate at a community level,” he said. “These types of tools help us build a national standard for how this should be approached and in the underwriting process, ensure that we’re measuring the quality of the appraisal and the quality of the condition ratings against a repeatable standard.”
Apart from implementing machine learning and computer vision to analyze and compare property values, the real estate valuation technology company is also pondering how generative AI can be integrated into the appraisal and underwriting process.
“There’s a lot of great new possibilities that are being explored with generative AI and we’re certainly looking at that as well,” Chen said.
“There’s still obviously very real challenges that we as an industry need to tackle, particularly in the racial housing gap,” he added. “We still have a long way to go in closing that gap for especially black and brown homeowners and it’s important to ensure that the techniques that we’re using for underwriting for other types of decisioning like appraisal are consistent and accurate in every community.”
National Mortgage News sat down with Chen to talk about how artificial intelligence is helping to create fairer standards of valuing homes and also how technology is set to change the appraisal space going forward. This interview has been edited and condensed.
