House #19: First Appraisal

I mentioned last week that we were having some appraisal issues with The Flood House (here’s that post)…

After finding out that the appraisal came in low, my wife and I scrambled to find better comps than the appraiser used, and to figure out why the appraisal didn’t reflect the value we believed it should. Ultimately, we came up with a much better comp than one of the ones he was using, and we also determined that he missed a couple adjustments that he should have made on the comps he did use.

The buyer’s mortgage broker submitted a rebuttal to the underwriter and appraiser, and it’s taken nearly a week to get a response. But, we just found out that the appraiser revised the appraisal, and the new value is $5000 higher, which gets us to within $500 of the contract price on this house. We’re happy to eat the $500, as that seems much closer to the value we were predicting, so we’re pressing forward with this buyer.

Because this is an FHA loan on a property we’ve only owned for about 80 days, we need to have a second appraisal on the house. This was ordered today, and will hopefully be completed in the next week or so. We’re hopeful that we don’t run into the same problems we had earlier on the first appraisal.

This sale is scheduled to close next Friday, but given that the second appraisal was just ordered today, I’m not sure that’s possible — though we’ll certainly be pressing for it once the second appraisal is completed.

I’ll post an update once I have more info on the second appraisal and the progress of the closing…