Wall Street has turned to a quick and cheap valuation process, sometimes outsourcing them to firms in India at $10 an appraisal. The process is now drawing scrutiny as these appraisals have been used to value collateral in $20B in bonds.
AbVin co-founder Abhishek Shimoga Onkaraswamy said his staff of 50 in Bangalore churns out as many as 300 BPOs a day using the clearinghouses of sales and listings data compiled by Realtors, who he said provide AbVin with login information, as well as websites like Zillow. “There’s not a big difference between what a broker can do and what we can do,” he said. “We know what these companies are expecting from the brokers.”