Day 50

Another appraisal. Another value. In another post, I told you about the very low appraisal we got a few weeks ago. Well, we decided to bail on the bank that we were using, and that was dropping the ball in more ways than one. I ran into person after person there that would just not return my calls, or didn’t seem to be in a hurry to do anything. Even after resubmitting information to the appraiser we had through that bank, he would not change his valuation of the property and house.

My realtor mentioned that they had a client that recently had a deal done with another bank that went very smoothly. I found out who did it and decided to give them a call. By the end of the day, I had applied online and the mortgage person had printed off my application by that night. A morning or so later, she had already gotten an appraisal ordered. The appraiser called me by 10:00 that next morning.

So, we sat on pins and needles for the next half a day. I was expecting a few day process, because of how things had gone at the other bank. Not the case here. We knew the next morning that we got the value we needed!

We were going to be able to build and have the equity necessary to prevent carrying PMI (Private Mortgage Insurance). On a house the size of ours, PMI could be as much as $250/mo. I really did not want to have that kind of a fee added to our house note if possible. And with this latest appraisal, it looks like we won’t have to have PMI.

So, I am glad I switched over and went with this other financial institution. The only bad things about this part of the process: we wasted about 5 weeks of time with this other institution, and we now had to pay for the first appraisal. A sum of $425!

Overall, I am very happy with how the appraisal came out. Now, on to the next step.

Until next time…

Day 48

Resubmit to appraiser for 2nd opinion. Last time I wrote, I told you about the low appraisal that we got on our property and house we are building. We were told by the banker that we could submit to the appraiser a detailed cost estimate from our builder. This would allow him to see that his first appraisal was far too low, and hope that he would bring the value up.

Turns out, he could not use that method to reappraise the property. However, my banker didn’t decide that he wanted to tell me this until it had been about a week of us waiting. I finally heard from him, saying that we needed to go another route. When we spoke on the phone, he said that he knew pretty much that first day that the appraiser would not accept this cost estimate from our builder, but rather needed some comparables to go off of. Well, if he had just let me know the day he found that out, rather than waiting a whole week, I could have had them right back to him that afternoon. You see, my Realtor had already pulled some comparables, and five of them.

The next day or so, the appraiser came back to us, saying that he would not change the value of the property. He said the “values in the area” don’t support what we are asking for. He basically implied that the Flowood area was declining, which I know for a fact is false.

I talked to the banker again, trying to figure out what to do next. He said we would need to order another appraisal. These things are not just pennies, you know. They cost over $400 each. Therefore, I asked him to take care of the second one, since it was due to a dropping of the ball on his part that caused another weeklong delay for us. He refused and asked how we would like to proceed.

I found out about another mortgage agent at another bank. We were under a time crunch, as we need to close on the land by the end of business Halloween. The contract we wrote up for the land stated that we would close within 45 days, and that day will be 45 days. Well, this new person made quick work out of getting all of our information and ordering another appraisal. The appraiser called me to meet with me that next morning. He was ready to visit our property and take photos of the lot. I was not able to meet him when he did this, but I needed to meet up with him to pass off a set of our plans to him. So, on a lunch break, I drove to meet him in Brandon, since we were heading out of town the next morning.

He has our plans. He knows the type of house we are building. He knows the materials we are using. My Realtor has talked to him and has told him where we need to be.

We just really hope that he comes back with the value that we are looking for. It is not like this is just a number we have plucked out of our heads, but rather one that we have researched and found to be a good average for that area.

Until next time…