Getting an Appraisal

So you've been told it's time to get an appraisal, now what? What even is an appraisal?

So an appraisal is funny- - it is someone's opinion about what your house is worth, that's really all it is.

I know it sounds scary and it sounds official, and it is official, and it can be scary but you know part of what they say, back in the crisis of 2008 was that part of the problem was that appraisers were just rubber stamping houses and saying "Yep, that's worth $400,000." "Yep that's worth $300,000", well that's gone away and one of the ways it has gone away is that mortgage companies now just kind of put out a pool and say "Hey we have an appraisal" and then an appraiser grabs it and goes and does the appraisal, so it's always almost like a lottery system of who's going to do the appraisal.

Now if you were my customer, one of the things that I would tell you to do is to make sure that you're there with the appraisers there to talk to the appraiser about what upgrades you've done and you're super nice to them. I joke about it all the time, the appraiser plays god in this situation right?

They determine the value of the house, so we want to make sure that we show the value, especially in a crazy market like we are in right now, we're trying to justify a lot of these values because even though you have closings around you, it's hard to price a house right now- we've talked about that in other videos.

It is so hard for the appraisers as well, so we want to make sure that the appraiser has all the equipment that he or she needs to go in, and to figure out the value of that home, and all of that comes from you the seller because the appraiser might not know that you just put in (give or take) $5,000 of new insulation up in the attic, right?

They might now know that those hurricane impact windows you just put in are only a month old, it makes a difference and you get value from that, and that's going to help us get your purchase price to match the loan price of the person buying the house. Now someone's buying your house with cash, guess what, they hardly ever get an appraisal, there's no need to, who cares, it's what the market will bear right?

Thank you for reading, if you have any other questions, be sure to contact me!