Who is the person measuring your house for a hybrid appraisal?

Fannie Mae describes this person as a trained and vetted third party. Its own examples are a real estate agent, an insurance inspector or an appraiser.

The finished report says which kind of person did the visit. The categories Fannie Mae lists are appraiser, appraiser trainee, real estate agent, home inspector, insurance inspector and other. The report also records the date the collection happened.

The work is guided by an app on a handheld device, built to a standard format Fannie Mae calls the Uniform Property Dataset. That format covers photos, property details and a floor plan drawn to the ANSI measuring standard.

The collector also has to flag anything that looks like a safety, soundness or structural problem, and any significant unfinished construction or renovation. Once the visit is done, the data goes to Fannie Mae's Property Data API and then to the appraiser.

Fannie Mae treats the data collection and the appraisal as separate assignments that different people may perform. If an appraiser is hired to collect data and is later hired to appraise the same house, the job still counts as a hybrid.

The appraiser who signs the report is the one responsible for the value. The effective date of a hybrid appraisal is the day the appraiser reaches that opinion, not the day of the visit.

Fannie Mae requires lenders to show that their data collectors pass an annual background check, are professionally trained, and are trained on fair lending laws. The collector must have no interest in or ties to the loan, the people involved or the property.

Lenders also have to review each collector's credentials every year, keep a way to suspend or drop collectors, and check their work through quality control before and after closing.

The collection covers interior and exterior areas, so the collector will need to see every room. Because the collector is not the valuer, questions about price or comparable sales are for the appraiser and the lender, not the person holding the tablet.