War of the Words

It’s 3:30 pm and I promised my client I would have it delivered by 5:00 pm.  However, I’ve run into a little bit of a quandary. 

You see, over the past several weeks, I have had three conditions on prior appraisals because of the following:  “strong”, “school district” and “close proximity”.  The latter was simply a reference to the property’s location near the ocean, which is relatively common where I operate, but each term was innocuous and routine — unless of course you take them out of context. Lenders have run my appraisals through their AI machinery and determined that these words are verboten (they were considered subjective or showing bias in the case of “school district”).  Now I’ve run into a big problem that I’m hoping someone can solve.  The word? “Master”.  Yes, I’m well aware what was formerly a master bedroom is now universally accepted in the real estate world as the primary bedroom and I utilize this terminology within all my appraisals, however, the problem is my subject property is located within a “master planned community” and I’m worried I will get flagged for just mentioning it. 

Let’s dig into this a little further.  By itself, the word “master” understandably has negative connotations, however, the label “master bedroom”, has been widely accepted over the greater part of the past century and is not based on any racial (or sexist) history.  HUD even looked into the matter in the 1990’s and came to the same conclusion. As it turns out, “master bedroom” was first coined circa 1926 by Sears, Roebuck and Co. to market a high end kit home through their catalog (the Amazon of their day) in order to showcase the floor-plan’s largest bedroom.  The term began to stick and quickly entered into the real estate vernacular.

But over time (and especially over the past decade), the spirit of the times was indicating a change was coming. The idea that “master” could be possibly derogatory to their clients, one major city underwent an effort to agree to make the label change to “primary bedroom” permanently.  Other MLS’s followed suit shortly thereafter and now there appears to be a nationwide consensus on the name change.

To be fair, I still don’t know what HUD’s position is on the matter of the word “master” in regard to an appraisal.  A thorough Google search looking into it has also left me empty handed.  But, if the past few months are any clue, the GSE’s are serious about any problematic words being omitted from any and all appraisal reports despite their context.   I could omit the first word, but “master planned community” has a different meaning altogether than just a “planned community”.  What would you do?