Black family receives a home appraisal $259k higher than original after asking a white neighbor to present it for them, report says

• A Black family received a low home appraisal on their home in Seattle, Washington.
• They asked a white neighbor to present it to appraisers and "whitewashed" their home, King 5 reported.

A Black family from Seattle, Washington, received a significantly higher home appraisal after "whitewashing" the property and asking a white neighbor to present it for them, local media outlet King 5 reported.

"It is a part of our systematic racism that is here in America, but we need to do something about it," said Joe Clark, the homeowner, in an interview with King 5. "It's taking away our generational wealth."

The Clark family said they bought their home in Seattle's Columbia City neighborhood for a little under $1m four years ago. Since then, they told King 5 they renovated it by updating the kitchen and a bathroom and adding an extra bathroom.

The family requested a home appraisal when considering financing options to fund their renovations, per King 5, but were shocked by how the value of their home had seemingly dropped significantly to $670,000.

"The appraisal came in very low, which was really unexpected, said the homeowner. "My agent asked me, 'How was the appraisal?' I said, 'It came in really low.' 'Oh, because it was $800,000-$900,000?' and I'm like, 'No, no, it was in the sixes,'" said Clark, per King 5.

Clark said he was so shocked to have an appraisal that low that he decided to stage an experiment to ensure that the family got "fair market value" for their home, according to King 5. Clark asked his white neighbor Marta Eull to present the home, he told King 5.

"The objective was to see if you had a person that was not someone of color in the house…if that would change the amount that he got for the appraisal to see if there was some kind of bias there," said Eull, per the local media outlet.

Clark also began "whitewashing" his home, he told King 5, by removing African art and family photos.

The second appraisal came in at $259,000 higher than the original. The house was valued at $929,000, King 5 reported.

"We're talking a three-week period, and nothing else changed in the house outside of me," said Clark, per King 5.

"I was really happy that it came back, and it was better for Joe, but I was mad that they had to go through that to get an appraisal that the rest of the neighborhood was at," said Eull, according to the local media outlet.

Clark said the first appraisal took less than 30 minutes, and the appraiser did not ask him any questions about the home or neighborhood or take into account the renovations, King 5 reported.

The second appraisal, led by his white neighbor, took an hour longer and considered the value of homes sold locally, King 5 reported.

Junia Howell, an urban sociologist and race scholar, told King 5: "Am I surprised by this case? Well, I've seen a lot of them. I've seen a lot around the country."

The New York Times reported in August that a Black couple in Baltimore, Maryland, claimed their home was undervalued by an appraisal company because of their race.

Nathan Connolly and his wife, Shani Mott, had their home valued by an appraisal company at $472,000, The Times reported. They purchased their home for $450,000 in 2017 and spent $40,000 on renovations. The couple also noted that house prices had rocketed in Baltimore in the past five years, per The Times.

Conducting a similar experiment to the Clark family, Connolly asked a white colleague to stand in for them. The Times reported that the second appraiser valued the home at $750,000 — a $278,000 increase.

A recent study by the Brookings Institute found that biased appraisal leads to the devaluation of housing in areas predominately populated by people of color. It found that homes in Black, Latino, or Hispanic neighborhoods are much more likely than homes in white neighborhoods to be undervalued.

Appraisal differences amounted to roughly $48,000 per home or $156 billion cumulatively in majority Black neighborhoods, according to the Brookings Institute's estimates.