2026 Coastal California Conference: Appraiser Takeaways
- Soren Nieminen
- Jul 16
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 16
The 2026 Coastal California Conference presented July 16, 2026 over Zoom by the Northern California Chapter of the Appraisal Institute, successor to the Monterey Bay Appraisal Seminar that dates back to 1960 was a 4-hour conference that focused on several key sessions:
A Chat with the Chief – Angela G. Jemmott
Bureau Chief, California Bureau of Real Estate Appraisers
Short-Term Rental Fundamentals in a Changing Policy Environment
Denis DeSaix, MAI, SRA, Principal, MetroCal Appraisal
Kate Daniels, Monterey County Supervisor – District 5
Unmasking the Underwriter
– Jennifer Kraus, Vice President, Commercial Real Estate Underwriting, Fremont Bank
– Brittany Marrow, MAI, Chief Appraiser, Fremont Bank
– Jacinto Munoz, MAI, SRA, AI-GRS, AI-RRS, CRE, Managing Director, Principal, Cogito Realty Partners LLC
Artificial Intelligence and USPAP: Where Innovation Meets Compliance
Greg Migdale, AI-GRS, Chief Executive Officer, Monterey Cypress Appraisal
Chandra Mast, Founder, Red Rose Appraisals
Justin Gohn, MAI, Principal, Gohn & Company
Jacinto Munoz, MAI, SRA, AI-GRS, AI-RRS, CRE, Managing Director, Principal, Cogito Realty Partners LLC
terey Cypress Appraisal
As a Certified General appraiser focused on commercial work in the East Bay, I left with practical notes from all four sessions. Here's what stuck.
The keynote: Sankofa, and a greying profession
Angela G. Jemmott, Bureau Chief of the California Bureau of Real Estate Appraisers (BREA), opened with the West African concept of Sankofa, depicted as a bird flying forward with its head turned back emphasizing the wisdom of looking backward while moving forward. It framed her comparison of the profession then and now: the 1980s appraiser worked from paper files, MLS books, and hard-won neighborhood knowledge; today's appraiser has AVMs, GIS, drones, and AI on tap. Her walk-away message: whatever tools we adopt, the most important technology in the appraisal process is still the appraiser.
She was also candid about demographics. Ours is a greying profession, and the licensing pipeline is a live regulatory concern
Short-term rentals: guests, not tenants
The Airbnbs and VRBOs are in changing times. Monterey County Supervisor Kate Daniels gave the policy view from a county where tourism pressure collides with a housing shortage. Her county's ordinance caps commercial STRs at 4% of homes in each land-use planning area and sorts permits into three tiers:
Homestays (a resident on site, designed as an easy one-day permit)
Limited rentals (any home, up to three times a year)
Commercial STRs (no resident on site requiring a discretionary use permit, subject to the cap).
Two details jumped out. First, the enforcement gap: before the ordinance, roughly 430 rentals were paying transient occupancy tax while some 600 more were advertising on Airbnb and VRBO. Permit counts and reality are sometimes very different datasets. Second, the ordinance has already been tested in court as a tentative ruling in June upheld the core framework, including the 4% cap, while striking provisions that limited participation to individual owners rather than LLCs.
Denis DeSaix, MAI, SRA then translated policy into valuation, starting with vocabulary:
STR occupants are guests, not tenants. It's a contractual lodging arrangement rather than a lease, which changes the analysis entirely in California jurisdictions with rent control.
A “rent survey” for an STR is really an estimate of annual revenue, and the metrics borrow from hotel practice including average daily rate (ADR) applied to occupied nights, with strong occupancy at 60–75% even in great locations, and seasonality driving the mix.
The core concept: an operating STR is a going concern, and its price can reflect the total assets of the business. What is a going concern? It is the business having the ability to continue as a business entity in the future. It involves four components:
Real Property (meaning the land, improvements, and property rights associated with those)
Tangible Assets which includes things like Furniture, FIxture, and Equipment (FF&E). Think like beds, couches, silverware, television, lighting, etc. Typical costs in the Bay Area can range from $20,000+ depending on the quality.
Intangible Assets: These are nonphysical assets which can includes things like contracts or 'goodwill'.
Financial Assets: Can be cash on hand or future booking deposits in your short term rental.
DeSaix was careful with the caveat: intangible value is contributory only when the operation succeeds; a struggling STR may add nothing beyond the real estate itself.
His illustration: if a $1 million condo trades at $1.4 million as a running STR operation, the $400,000 delta is business value, not real estate. Since Fannie, Freddie, and most lenders lend against the real property alone, the task is to identify what the price represents withinin the subject and in any comp that sold as an operating STR. That means verifying it with market participants and allocating appropriately. It's a niche, and DeSaix made a fair case that in high-STR submarkets it's a competency worth building; the Appraisal Institute now offers a seven-hour course on it.
Unmasking the underwriter: how credit reads our reports
Fremont Bank's Jennifer Kraus (commercial real estate underwriting) and Brittany Marrow, MAI (chief appraiser), joined by Jacinto Munoz, MAI, SRA, made one thing plain: the appraisal drives the deal. Credit teams size a loan up front from operating statements and sometimes with rules of thumb, but everyone is waiting to see what the appraisal says.
Their pet peeves read like a quality control checklist. The biggest:
NOI projections that contradict the appraiser's own market analysis. Let's say you're evaluating the office market is broadly at 20–25% vacancy, then plugging 10% into the pro forma without explanation. Underwriters will catch it.
Absorption and stabilization periods that run optimistic. A discounted cash flow analysis can be helpful while naming your assumptions. Often appriasers may be asked for an "As Is" value and "As Stabilized" and it's very important to validate it with what people who are in the market including investors and brokers/agents.
Reconciliations that dispose of a complex property in two sentences instead of explaining how the subject fits into the bigger picture. Explain it!
A couple other takeaways:
As-is value matters even when highest and best use points to redevelopment: entitlements stall, construction costs spike, and the bank needs to know what its collateral is worth if the plan falls apart.
Insurance has become a genuine pressure point: insurable value is not market value, cost-service figures like Marshall & Swift Valuation can run light, and for a California-concentrated lender, items the market shrugs off, including seismic retrofits, for one, still matter to credit.
Stress test the assumptions. Munoz put numbers on the stakes: in a debt-service-constrained environment, a 100-basis-point swing in a vacancy assumption can move a deal more than the cap rate does.
Remaining economic life (REL) drew similar scrutiny. Banks tie loan amortization to it, and Munoz called it one of the least-supported numbers in our reports. A short REL is really a claim about obsolescence, and the appraiser should be ready to say which kind: economic, functional, or physical.
AI and USPAP: the tool can't take the blame
The closing panel including Chandra Mast, Justin Gohn, MAI, Jacinto Munoz, and Greg Migdale, AI-GRS was the most immediately useful hour for my own workflow.
The through-line: the appraiser is still in charge. A tool cannot comply with USPAP; the appraiser verifies everything and protects confidentiality.
On confidentiality, we start with a clean starting question: is the information actually confidential under USPAP meaning (largely) identified as such by the client and not available from other sources? A rent roll stamped “confidential” qualifies; public records don't; assignment results do. And read your engagement letters as banks increasingly classify material explicitly.
On tooling, Gohn laid out a practical hierarchy: enterprise offerings with zero-data-retention terms, cloud services with those protections built in, or locally run open-source models for the most sophisticated shops with SOC 2-audited business plans now within reach of small firms. My takeaway is that it's important to know the tools, limitations, how they work, and align with how peers and your own judgement weighed against broader regulatory and risk framings.
He also punctured some of the panic: we've trusted email and cloud storage with client data for decades without holding them to the standard now being demanded of AI. The risk isn't new, and neither is the discipline it requires.
A few working notes I flagged for myself:
Hallucinations are often a context problem, so interrogate the prompt before blaming the model
Disclosure of AI use belongs in engagement letters and certifications
The workfile should document how tools were used. The panel walked through the record-keeping guidance in Advisory Opinion 41 (which is dedicated to Artificial Intelligence and Appraisal) and the “good faith” standard it implies.
We're operating at speed. Stuff two months old....is now just old.
Evergreen takeaways
STRs: Sale price is not real property value. Identify what a going-concern price represents, verify it with market participants, and allocate. Intangible value contributes only while the operation succeeds.
Underwriting: Reconcile every projection with your own market analysis, support the absorption period, and give the as-is value real work even when highest and best use argues for redevelopment.
Risk and insurance: Insurable value is not market value. Expect credit to care about seismic retrofits, coverage gaps, and remaining economic life even when the market shrugs.
AI: The appraiser owns compliance as no tool can meet USPAP for you. Define confidentiality before anything gets uploaded, favor zero-data-retention tools or at a minimum that no data you upload is used to train public models, document use in the workfile, disclose it in the certification, and treat weak output as a context problem before a model problem. Verify all!
The profession: Tools change; judgment is the technology that matters. Sankofa: look back while you move forward.
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