Atlas VMS’s Erik Morin on HECM second appraisals, AIM-Port acquisition

Like other segments of the broader housing industry, the appraisal space is rapidly evolving through consolidation, technology adoption and federal policy shifts. Reverse mortgage professionals should be mindful of these factors as they work with appraisers to close deals.

Erik Morin, CEO of Miami-based Atlas VMS, a Miami-based appraisal management company (AMC) and technology platform, recently sat down with HousingWire’s Reverse Mortgage Daily (RMD) for a high-level discussion on the appraisal business. Morin offered his thoughts on second appraisal requirements for federally insured reverse mortgages, the ongoing U.S. appraiser shortage, his company’s tech-driven expansion efforts and more.

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Neil Pierson: As part of the request for information sent out last year by the government, people have raised concerns with second appraisals for Home Equity Conversion Mortgages (HECMs). What are your views on the issue? How often does a second appraisal occur with a reverse mortgage, and how much time and cost does it add if you need one?

Erik Morin: The second appraisal process has been around for a minute. We’ve always felt it to be a little unfortunate — or a lot unfortunate — based on the borrowers this policy impacts the most. We’re trying to reduce costs for these particular borrowers and help them out of tough situations. All of a sudden, they’re getting layered with a second appraisal, just to try to verify the situation on the first appraisal.

Frankly, organizations like mine, we make more money with second appraisals. There’s no hiding that, but we’re not excited about it. We know that at the end of the day, it hurts transactions, it hurts borrowers, and it puts loan officers and everyone else in the ecosystem in a challenging spot where they’re unsure whether they should even move forward with the transaction.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac solved this in conventional lending a long time ago, where you get a CU (Collateral Underwriter) score, then you go in and address the challenges with the appraisal. You see if you can get better information, or you use supplemental valuation tools to check things out.

Over the years, we’ve seen a call for second appraisals impact upwards of 20% to 25% of transactions. We’re not seeing that today inside our organization. I asked my data people to run an analysis on the first quarter of 2026. The share of HECM loans that we did a second appraisal on was 8.3%. The data for Q4 2025 was moderately higher at 10.4%.

Pierson: For novices in the reverse mortgage industry, how would you explain the differences between appraisals on a forward mortgage transaction versus a reverse transaction? What are the fundamentals that people need to grasp?

Morin: I think you have a higher expectation for deferred maintenance on the reverse side. That comes with varying factors.

What we prepare most for as an AMC is the borrower — because every borrower is different. Many of them haven’t had an appraiser in their home for quite some time. There’s a lot of education to prepare them for what the appraiser’s going to be looking at.  

Homeowners tend to be very engaged with the appraiser, which can be a double-edged sword. When you compare the two — a forward assignment with a reverse assignment — we see a lot more reverse borrowers following the appraiser around and sharing information. Sometimes the information isn’t the best for them to be sharing.

Pierson: One of the hot topics in appraisal is UAD 3.6, which will become mandatory for GSE loan submissions in November. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac don’t purchase reverse mortgages, but is there anything the RMD audience should know about this change and how it might streamline appraisals?

Morin: I don’t think anyone can speak to what 3.6 is doing in the current environment yet, let alone what it’s going to do to the reverse space. Most of the software providers can’t deliver a full report on 3.6 yet.

As both an AMC and a technology provider — because we have a platform that’s used by lenders and other AMCs — we’re 3.6 ready. But as far as the impacts, we haven’t even lived through the forward side. We’ll look forward to seeing the impacts of 3.6 in reverse and in non-QM. We do a lot of non-QM work too.

Personally, I think it looks like a better report. It’s going to take time to get used to, but overall, I think it’s a step in the right direction. There’s just so many moving parts to getting it right, and you’re talking about appraisers who have historically bucked change.

Pierson: Let’s discuss the appraiser shortage in this country, which has been a well-documented topic. Where do things stand in that regard? Are there enough appraisers to meet demand today? Are the training requirements appropriate or too time-consuming?

Morin: I’m going to be really upfront — I worked on a lot of these issues over the course of the past decade and prelaunching of Atlas. I was a partner at Class Valuation. We worked on appraiser shortages. But the past few years for me has really been focused on building my new AMC, and I haven’t focused much on the industry pieces that I once had the time to delve into.

It’s not dissimilar to what it was before. We do see a shortage in rural markets, rural states. That’s been the case for a long time. What we also see right now is an appraisal market — and a real estate and mortgage market — that is not at its peak volume. We’re in sort of a down cycle — ups and downs. For the marketplace that currently exists, we seem to get it done. Our turn times aren’t too crazy. Fees seem to be pretty balanced. But we will absolutely see, if there’s a significant shift in mortgage rates that causes higher demand, some of the wheels come off.

I’m sure a lot of mortgage people will read this, and they would love to see rates come down substantially so all of a sudden there’s a refi boom. If we tried to deal with that without being able to do a 3.6 report, that’s going to be a problem. Right now it’s not required. But there’s a hard-stop requirement in November. If there’s a significant rate shift then and people still couldn’t deliver reports, we would be in a bit of a tricky situation.

Pierson: Let’s finish up by talking about some of the work you’re doing at Atlas. You made an acquisition last year by bringing on AIM-Port. You also recently announced a warranty policy to reduce repurchase risks. What was the impetus for these decisions?

Morin: At my last AMC, we built our own platform. It allowed us to create custom workflows and different benchmarks in the appraisal process. Being that Atlas is so heavily focused in niche areas like reverse and non-QM, having your own way of doing things is kind of how I’ve always had new companies built on.

We were trying to do the order management inside of a third-party system. It was fine and we were making the best of it, but we had an opportunity to buy a platform that could solve our challenges. We found a platform that was better than anything we’d ever seen on the market. It had revenue and profitability. We went ahead and made that deal.

It’s been a game changer for us. Our growth been astronomical — way better than projected. We will have an integration with QuantumReverse — not just as an AMC but as a platform — which will probably happen this summer. For lenders doing work on Quantum, which is the primary LOS in the reverse space, they’ll be able to push their orders directly from Quantum into AIM-Port, and then the lenders on that system will be able to push them out to us or the other AMCs that are integrated, which is most of them.

The other question was on the warranty side. The warranty primarily benefits the forward lending side of the business, but we know the challenge exists. Repurchase risk is always happening; it drives decisions and fears. We’re confident in our systems and in our quality. We’re just standing behind that and saying, ‘Look, we’re insuring against the risk, and if you have a claim, we’re there to cover it.’

There are a few other folks out there that have warranties, but the fine print really limits what it covers, for the most part. They really leverage the GSEs and their coverages. Some of them cost money or they require you to buy extra levels of QC in order to qualify. When we reviewed ours, we really took those barriers out as much as we could.