Investigating the influence of assertions by accounting and appraisal professionals on real estate lending decisions

The research problem was concerned with measuring the extent to which assertions by individuals with professional expertise may influence the decisions of commercial real estate lenders as the reliability of prospective financial information is assessed. Three professional designations were considered: Member of the Appraisal Institute (MAI), Certified Management Accountant (CMA), and Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Prospective financial information was focused on a commercial real estate project being evaluated by selected bank loan officers. The primary objective of the study was to examine the effects of these credentials, individually and in combination, on decisions made by commercial real estate lenders. The secondary objective was to determine which of twelve literature based criteria were most important to the loan underwriting process.; This study was conducted as a field experiment. Identical financial statements were integrated into the loan package and presented to each of eight subsets of a sample of lending officers located in seven states. To achieve the primary objective, the manipulation included the presence or absence of professional credentials in information supporting the loan application package. Respondents were asked to make a loan approval decision, to indicate a risk premium above prime that would be charged, and to estimate a default risk measure for the loan. The secondary objective required respondents to rank order the underwriting importance of twelve criteria from the relevant literature.; Effects of combinations of credentials were compared through ANOVA. In evaluating loan approval decisions, treatments containing both the CPA and CMA credentials were found to be significantly different from those not including the CPA. Also, treatments that contained the CPA but not the CMA elicited a greater loan approval rate than treatments without the CPA. Conversely, the MAI credential did not prove to be a factor that significantly affected loan approval decisions. Finally, the effects of individual credentials, when compared by ANOVA, found the CPA credential to be significant when both the loan approval and default risk measures were considered. The Tukey Studentized Range Test revealed "cash flow of the borrower" to be the most important criterion to lenders in this study.