‘Scrub Blackness from Our Home’: Oakland Couple Forced to Whitewash Their Home to Prove Its Worth — Appraiser Who Undervalued It by $254K Now Faces Consequences

A couple in Oakland, California, has won a legal victory over an appraiser and lender who undervalued their home by $254,000 during a refinance, which the state determined was due to racial bias. As the result of a settlement overseen by the California Civil Rights Department (CRD), Ronald and Dominique Curtis received $75,000 from appraiser Mehdi Mehdipour-Mossafer, who also agreed to pay $15,000 to the CRD and to watch “Our America: Lowballed,” a documentary on the impact of appraisal discrimination on Black and Latino families produced by ABC7 News in San Francisco. The Curtises purchased a duplex in Oakland in 2019, hoping to build equity and some day leave the home to their young daughter, according to a statement by Fair Housing Advocates of Northern California (FHANC), a nonprofit organization.

After making significant renovations, in April of 2020 the home was appraised at $1.15 million. In December 2020, seeking to take advantage of historically low interest rates, they applied to Quicken Loans (now Rocket Mortgage) to refinance their home. As part of the process, Mehdipour-Mossafer, a licensed real estate appraiser, inspected the house and prepared an appraisal report. The Curtises said they were shocked to receive a valuation of $900,000 from the appraiser — $254,000 lower than it had been appraised for earlier that year. Ronald Curtis, who is Black, is a real estate agent in the Bay Area and Dominique Curtis, who is Puerto Rican and identifies as Latina, worked with him at a local brokerage and was training to be an appraiser at the time. (She is now a licensed appraiser). As real estate professionals they had access to multiple listing service (MLS) data and used it to compile and submit a 60-page appeal requesting a reconsideration of value, reported ABC7.

The couple took issue with the properties used in the appraisal report as comparable homes, including several that were blighted with boarded-up windows, a caved-in garage and bricks sitting atop roof shingles to hold them in place. They suspected racial bias might be at play. But Mehdipour-Mossafer refused to change the appraisal, and ultimately the Curtises were unable to secure the refinanced loan. According to their complaint, the lender only followed up to offer a second appraisal after the Curtises went public with their concerns on local TV news. 

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