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Florida Class Action: What’s It Mean for Appraisers?
by Isaac Peck, Publisher
For the second time in just over a year, a class action lawsuit is challenging how appraisal management companies (AMCs) handle the fees borrowers pay for appraisals. Arnold v. Appraiser Nation, filed in a Florida federal court in December 2025, accuses Appraisal Nation, AMC Links, and United Wholesale Mortgage of charging borrowers appraisal fees that bear little relation to what the appraiser actually receives, and concealing the difference.
The case advances arguments similar to those in Timmins v. Clear Capital, Core Valuation Management, and Rocket Mortgage, the California class action lawsuit we covered in our Summer 2025 issue. But Arnold takes a different legal path. Where Timmins proceeds under California’s state consumer-protection statutes, Arnold frames its claims under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act of 1974, targeting RESPA’s prohibitions against unearned charges and fee-splitting in settlement services.
The timing is not coincidental. Many appraisers had looked to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to force separation of appraisal and AMC fees on consumer disclosures. That effort stalled when the agency’s authority was curtailed in early 2025. With federal rulemaking off the table, the pressure has shifted to the courts.
Together, the two suits suggest that litigation is emerging as the primary vehicle for challenging appraisal-fee practices, but it may not be the only one. If cases like Arnold and Timmins continue to gain traction, the pressure on regulators to revisit appraisal-fee disclosure rules will only increase. Here are the details.
How We Got Here
The NAR’s $418 million settlement in 2024 over price-fixing and compensation transparency demonstrated that litigation can force structural change in real estate, even when regulators decline to act. The appraisal-fee lawsuits extend that logic. The same basic conditions that drove the NAR case—opaque pricing, limited consumer choice, and intermediaries shaping costs without accountability—are now being litigated over what borrowers pay for appraisals.
What the Complaint Argues
The lawsuit frames these practices as violations of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act (RESPA), which prohibits unearned fees and improper fee-splitting in settlement services. It also includes state-law claims and seeks restitution, damages, and injunctive relief on behalf of a nationwide class.
The plaintiffs ground their arguments in basic American free-market values. The complaint argues that the fee borrowers pay, anywhere “from $450 to over $1,000” for an appraisal, bear little relationship to what the appraiser receives. Instead, AMCs allegedly pay appraisers “only a fraction” of the fee while “deceptively keeping the remainder for themselves.” The Appraisal Regulation Compliance Council (ARCC), which has briefed the CFPB on these same practices, has documented cases in which AMCs retained more than 60 percent of borrower-paid appraisal charges. The word “deceptively” is doing the legal work here: it asserts concealment and thus dishonesty. The borrower pays the most but sees the least, and the actual working appraisers are jerked around too.
The complaint then reframes the issue as a market failure, albeit an engineered one. It argues that “the typical dynamics of a free market are not present to keep the price competitive.” The lender chooses the AMC, but “the lender does not pay the AMC—the borrower is stuck to pay the AMC the lender contracts with,” and the borrower has “no ability to select an AMC or negotiate the AMC’s fees.” In this telling, the borrower is a price-taker in a system designed by others.
The complaint claims that transparency is the missing ingredient. “The only way to make AMCs’ fees subject to the healthy pressure of an efficient market,” it argues, is to “inform consumers of the details of the AMCs’ fees.” If borrowers knew how much of the appraisal fee went to the AMC, they could “demand that lenders compete for the borrower’s business by securing more competitive appraisal fees.” But, the complaint says, “this competition is not happening now because defendants obfuscate the excessive portion of appraisal fees the AMCs take for themselves.”
The complaint constructs a narrative in which borrowers face rising costs, lack meaningful choice, and are denied the information needed for a functioning market. One of its most compelling conclusions is the simple statement: “defendants provide no tangible benefit to borrowers.”
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Not So Easy to Win
While plaintiffs’ arguments are persuasive, the defendants may have structural and legal advantages. Litigation over appraisal-fee practices is running into obstacles that make these cases harder to win than they may appear at first glance.
The first challenge is responsibility: lenders, not AMCs, control every aspect of how appraisal-related charges are shown to borrowers. They decide whether AMC fees are passed through, how those fees are labeled, and how they appear on the Loan Estimate and Closing Disclosure. TRID (TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure) forms are lender-driven documents, and lenders rather than AMCs certify compliance with federal disclosure rules. AMCs operate within that framework but cannot alter it. That division of authority complicates any claim that AMCs misled borrowers simply by participating in a disclosure system they do not design or control. In plain terms, borrowers may dislike how the fee is presented, but the entity accused of deception isn’t the one that decides what the borrower sees.
Federal policy creates a second, equally significant barrier. When the CFPB finalized the TRID rule in 2013, it directly considered whether AMC and appraiser fees should be separated. Appraisers urged the agency to require distinct line-items so borrowers could see who was being paid what. The CFPB declined, pointing to Dodd-Frank’s language that allows (but doesn’t explicitly require) itemization. By choosing not to require separation, the agency effectively endorsed bundled disclosure as an acceptable practice. Congress briefly explored changing that framework in 2016, but the proposal never made it to a vote.
That regulatory history gives defendants a powerful argument: if federal law expressly permits bundling, it is difficult to portray the practice itself as inherently deceptive. The plaintiffs will need to do more than show that borrowers lacked the opportunity to see the fee breakdown; they’ll need to show that the way the fee was presented crossed a legal line even though regulators have long allowed the very structure they challenge. That’s going to be an uphill climb.
The defendants can even push back against the assertion that they “provide no tangible benefit to borrowers.” They frequently argue that AMCs manage appraiser panels, handle scheduling and communication, perform quality-control reviews, meet investor and underwriting requirements, and screen for fraud or conflicts. Those tasks, they say, help keep loans moving and reduce collateral-risk delays. AMCs, they argue, are like credit reporting agencies or flood certifiers. They support underwriting, regardless of whether the borrower can immediately see that benefit.
Calls for Reform from California to Florida
Both cases allege the same core facts: borrowers were overcharged, AMCs retained the majority of the fee, and the system was designed to prevent anyone from seeing the split. But their legal paths are different, and that difference matters. Timmins proceeds under California’s broad state consumer-protection statutes, which do not require proving a RESPA-style “unearned fee” or fee-splitting violation. Arnold must fit its theory into RESPA’s narrower framework while also overcoming the CFPB’s explicit acceptance of bundled appraisal/AMC fees and the fact that lenders, not AMCs, control TRID disclosures.
Regardless of how either case is ultimately decided, the direction is clear. AMCs and lenders are facing increasing pressure to justify bundled fee structures, and each new filing makes it harder for regulators to remain on the sidelines. For appraisers, greater transparency in how fees are disclosed to borrowers could ease the downward pressure that opaque AMC retention practices have created for more than a decade. Time will tell.
About the Author
Isaac Peck is the Publisher of Working RE magazine and the President of OREP Insurance, a leading provider of E&O insurance for real estate professionals. OREP serves over 10,000 appraisers with comprehensive E&O coverage, competitive rates, and 14 hours of CE at no charge for OREP Members (CE not approved in IL or AK). Visit OREP.org to learn more. Reach Isaac at isaac@orep.org or (888) 347-5273. CA License #4116465.