Appraisals

Found 3 blog entries about Appraisals.

What not to ask when selling your home: "What is my home worth?" or "What will my home appraise for?"  This is not the right way to understand the value of your home. An appraisal is an estimate of value or to put it more simply; one person's opinion of the value of your home. As we all know that opinion is not necessarily fact, it's important to know that there is no such thing as an absolute number that your home is worth

Here's what happened to one seller of mine. The buyer's appraisal of their home came in $70,000 below list price. Yikes! After hiring 3 different appraisers on the same house all 3 came back with very different "opinions" of value. After 2 weeks of convincing the banks, the buyers, and the REALTORS, I was able to sell the home for

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Recently one of our sellers had a buyer whose lender ordered an appraisal on the home.  It came back $80,000 LOW!  Can you imagine all the sudden feeling like you just lost $80,000?  We have heard about this happening to sellers all year long.

What is an appraisal?  Its an opinion of value. There is not an absolute formula for an appraiser to use when coming up with a value. That means the value will not always be the exact same value no matter who does the appraisal. But when you get a bad one what do you do?

Let me show you what we did:

This is the scenario we found ourselves in, the odds were stacked against us:  The agent representing the buyer was an appraiser for 30 years.  He felt like the appraisal was good.  The appraiser thought the

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If a house appraises for $X,000 and it sells for $X,000 then negotiating is kind of a mute point right?  Well, let's take a look at what an appraisal is.

First, an appraisal is an opinion of value. On the other hand, fair market value is the value a willing buyer and seller agree upon while neither of them are under any duress. Do you see the difference? Let me give you an example:  when I was first in the business over a decade ago I had an appraisal come in $20k lower than our agreed sales price. I explained to the buyer that this appraisal was 'an opinion of value' and fair market value may be $20k more. It took us another week, but sure enough we sold the home for $20k more with an appraisal that worked.

There is a misconception that

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