- 26 -
relies on a statute that had been repealed years earlier,
Atkinson replied as follows: “A I think this is boilerplate that
was put in by my secretary over the last--ever since 1992, and I
have never taken it out.”
As a result of the obvious errors in Atkinson’s expert
witness report, we are hesitant to rely on Atkinson’s judgment
even as to those matters that do not involve obvious errors.
Respondent’s expert witness in Norman C. Hulberg,
hereinafter sometimes referred to as Hulberg. He has been a real
estate appraiser since 1975. He has testified as an expert
witness “on over 50 occasions” in Federal District Courts in the
San Francisco area and in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Hulberg also used the comparable sales approach on, or in
connection with, his valuations. (See, e.g., infra B. Lafayette
Property, in which Hulberg used the comparable sales method only
to determine the reversionary value element of the discounted-
cash-flow method). Hulberg avoided the disconnects between
textual analysis and valuation adjustments that plague Atkinson’s
expert witness report. He did so by (1) the simple expedient of
abbreviating the textual analysis of the comparable properties,
and (2) the even simpler expedient of omitting altogether the
property-by-property matrix of adjustments to the comparable
property sale prices. By thus failing to reveal the details of
his analysis, Hulberg protects against the pitfalls that Atkinson
Page: Previous 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 NextLast modified: May 25, 2011