How I Successfully Appealed My Home Appraisal When It Was Wrong
How I Successfully Appealed My Home Appraisal When It Was Wrong
Updated: November 25, 2022 By Robert Farrington
Appeal Home Appraisal
If you've been through the home purchasing and lending process before, you know it is extremely tedious. You have to fill out long applications, get a bunch of paper work in order, and so on. In general, it is a lot of "hurry up, then wait". But the biggest factor most people are waiting on is the home appraisal. Well, last week, after a period of waiting, we got the appraisal back on the house we were looking to buy, and it ended up coming in a full $70,000 below our offer price, and well below fair market value to similar properties inside the same development. SO IRRITATING!
How could the appraiser think the value was so low? As a buyer, you'd think that would be a good thing (a lower price, right?), but in reality, this seriously jeopardized our deal. If we couldn't get a loan, the seller would have moved on, and sold the house at or near or offer price. We weren't overpaying for the house... something was just wrong.
The Appraiser Botched The Report
After reviewing the home appraisal, it became very clear what happened: the appraiser who did my appraisal botched the report. I can never say for sure if it was "pencil whipped" or he just made a lot of mistakes, but the bottom line is that there were 8 different technical and factual errors that contributed to this extremely low property valuation.
To make me even more frustrated, the appraiser only got his appraiser license 2 weeks prior to doing my house (in our state, appraisers have to be licensed and you can see a proof of their license in the report)!
Here are several factual things he missed that I found when looking over the report in detail:
He said he reviewed the sales contract (according to a box he checked on the report), but didn't include any of the seller concessions or the appliances included in the sale.
He had several discrepancies in the description of the home, including the foundation and exterior and interior descriptions
The first comparable sale he used was a foreclosure from last year, which is currently a pending sale as of the appraisal date. Instead of listing it as an active listing for the current price of $550,000, he listed it as a closed sale for the foreclosure price of $338,000. That is a huge difference and is probably what directly impacted the value of my home. You can obviously see it was a flip, and the appraiser totally failed to note that.
To continue reading, please go to the original article here:
https://thecollegeinvestor.com/18816/appealed-home-appraisal/