House #17: Appraisals

Because the buyer is FHA and we’ve only owned the house for about 6 weeks, The Escher House needs two appraisals before the loan will be cleared…

The first appraisal was scheduled for this past Wednesday. As usual, I put together my folder to give to the appraiser…this included a list of renovations, a detailed breakdown of labor and material costs, before and after pictures, and some comps that I thought would help us in getting the house to appraise where it needed to. When my wife and I went onto the MLS to find comps, we were very pleased to see that there have been a LOT of houses that have been sold and that have gone under contract in the past couple weeks. Probably due to the home buyer tax credit.

While I was initially concerned that we weren’t going to have enough comps for this house, we found that after adding in all the new sales and contracts, there likely wasn’t going to be much of an issue. In fact, of the 8 or so houses that had been For Sale in this subdivision, it appeared that about 5 of them had gone under contract or sold within the past three weeks! And it looked like there were plenty of other sales in nearby subdivisions that would support our sale price pretty easily.

So, we printed out a stack of comps, met the appraiser on Wednesday, and he confirmed that there really shouldn’t be any issues with this appraisal.

On Thursday morning, my wife and I were discussing that we needed to let the lender know not to order the second appraisal until late next week, as we were likely going on vacation for a couple days (and like I said, we always want to be there when the appraisal is taking place). Well, late Thursday afternoon around 4:30pm, my wife gets a call from the second appraiser saying he was at the house, and needed to get in.

Looks like the broker forgot to tell us that he ordered both appraisals at the same time, and also forgot to tell the appraiser to give us a call on his way over so we could let him in. Luckily, this appraiser was super nice, and was willing to come back in an hour when we could meet him. I rushed over to the house (with folder in hand) and met him for the second appraisal. He was a great guy, and we chatted for nearly 2 hours about everything from family to real estate, and he was even able to give me some insight into some other investing locations that I’d been considering (I think I have a new friend!).

Ultimately, we chatted a bit about comps, and it sounded like he was also pretty confident that the value should come in above our sale price.

So, two days, two appraisal, two very nice appraisers that seemed to be good at their jobs (which is rare these days!)… Hopefully things will continue to go smoothly on this sale, and we can start focusing on some new projects…