Ivy Road Properties, LLC, John DeYonker, III, W. Mark Shaw, and Kent S. Levenson appeal from the trial court’s order confirming the nonjudicial foreclosure sale of land which First Citizens Bank and Trust Company “First Citizens” held as security for a loan. A foreclosure sale was conducted by First Citizens on February 2, 2010, for a 34.89 acre tract on Ivey Road in unincorporated Cobb County. First Citizens submitted the only bid for the property in the amount of $1,533,000. At the confirmation hearing, First Citizens presented Dennis Carr, an MAI-designated independent real estate appraiser, as its expert witness on the issue of the true market value of the property. No objection was voiced by appellants to his qualifications or his opinion of the true market value of the property. Carr opined that the value of the property on the date of the foreclosure was $1,460,000. Carr’s written appraisal reports one from August 2009 and one from October 2010, effective as of February 2, 2010 were also admitted into evidence without objection. Carr looked for comparable land sales but could not find any that reflected the economic downturn. He found very few land sales at all and those reflected a drastic cut of forty percent and as much as sixty to seventy percent to account for a new layer of profit in an investor buying and holding the property for future sale. Therefore, Carr used a hybrid of the sales comparison and income approach in appraising the property to reflect the economic downturn. He used a sales comparison approach of pre-recessionary sales to come up with a “stabilized value” of the property in a normal, stabilized market, which was $2,360,000. In Carr’s opinion, the most likely buyer would be an investor or builder who would expect to hold the property for three years. Carr used a discount rate of 17 percent per year to account for the risk involved in purchasing now for future income. That discount resulted in a total of $1,473,000, from which Carr subtracted the expected tax costs for the three years, yielding his final opinion of value of $1,460,000.
Appellants do not challenge the validity of the statutory notices given, advertisements published, and/or reports filed by First Citizens regarding the foreclosure sale or that the sale was “regular,” but argue only that First Citizens’ expert’s opinion was not the product of a reliable method for determining the true market value of real property and did not establish the true market value of the property.
