On June 29th according to a FloridaToday.com story by Keyonna Summer and Wayne T. Price:
"A Brevard County judge on Thursday refused to shut down a Palm Bay appraiser's Web site that contained comments critical of the California-based appraisal management company First American eAppraiseIT." [See Appraisal Scoop]
Now we have the 54 page, official "Transcript of Proceedings", from the Circuit Court of the 18th Judicial Circuit in Brevard Co., FL - click here and we can get the facts of the case as they were presented to the judge.
According to the transcript, Anthony Merlo, President and CEO of First American eAppraiseIT, was the only witness for the plaintiff and testified via telephone from California. Opening remarks were presented by both sides and by page twelve of the transcript Mr. Merlo's testimony begins.
Some Plaintiff Highlights (snipped from testimony - not full content):
"Currently today we're doing business with the majority of the top five lenders in America: Chase, Washington Mutual, National City Mortgage"
"Our top two clients per months are generating today approximately $8 million a month in revenue."
"As an appraisal management company, we only have a few hundred staff appraisers that are actually employees in certain major markets. We rely heavily upon the local fee appraiser who is willing to work with us under our parameters, and without them, obviously it makes our operation and our performance very difficult for our clients."
"What we did was simply, when an order came in, opened the appraisal. Under much discussion and counsel from what we believed to have been experts, we felt that it was safe to unlock them, enter our watermarking, immediately re-lock them, secure them with a password, and continue our process of QC and delivery to the client. We were told that it would be safe to do this as long as we did not alter the values, the comparables, the data that would affect the opinion of value, or tamper with it."
"When it became - - when it came to my attention that it made our appraiser partners, those that worked with us and those that vowed never to work with us again, through these posting that it made them very uncomfortable, I immediately regrouped our senior management team, called in our counsel again, heard everybody's side of it , and the decision was to continue because we could make the basis that what we were doing was actually a stopgap measure. However, I took it under consideration, and in the abundance of caution, I authorized our IT department and our operations department to cease. And we stopped adding watermarks on April 12 of this year.
Click here to read the Defense Highlights (snipped from testimony - not full content):
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Following the testimony of Mr. Merlo Jr. and questioning by Judge John D. Moxley, Jr., Pamela Crowley's attorney, Eric A. Lanigan began with follow-up questions for plaintiff.
One of the more interesting exchanges was the one centered around the conversion of the original appraisal to a "different" format (Pg. 45)
For the complete 54 page, official "Transcript of Proceedings", from the Circuit Court of the 18th Judicial Circuit in Brevard Co., FL - click here and get the facts of the case as they were presented to the judge.
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