Rookie Reply: What To Do When an Appraisal Comes Back Low?

Ashley:
This is Real Estate Rookie Episode 198.

Ashley:
My name is Ashley Kehr, and I’m here with my co-host Tony Robinson.

Tony:
And welcome to the Real Estate Rookie Podcast where every week, twice a week, we bring you the inspiration, information, and answers to your questions to help you kickstart your real estate investing journey. And today we’ve got a really cool question coming in from the Real Estate Rookie Facebook group, and if you guys are not in the Real estate Rookie Facebook group, make sure you join. It is honestly one of the most active, the most engaged Facebook groups that I’ve seen for real estate investing.

Tony:
Today’s question comes from Montes Receivus, so Montes, hopefully I said your last name the right way, but Monte’s question is, “So my friend just encountered this situation I’ve never heard of before. My buddy placed an offer substantially above asking price, and the seller, before accepting the offer, asked my friend if he would be willing to pay the difference if the appraisal came in lower than the offer price. Very ballsy question. Has anyone encountered the situation before, and what would be the best response, if any?” So Ash, what are your thoughts on this?

Ashley:
Yeah, so an appraisal, it’s so tricky, and Tony, I’ve heard you mention this before about how it’s more of an art than a science, and I think that’s such a great advice because you can’t say for sure exactly what a property is going to appraise for even if you look at the comps or you look at what income it is bringing in. So this buddy, what they’re saying could happen, it definitely could happen where there could be a difference in the appraisal. So a couple things I do are do as much research as you can ahead of time as to try your best to estimate what the actual appraisal is going to be. So one thing I do is pull up the comps. I use Prop Stream. You can go to your county GIS mapping system and look at properties. You can also just go to a MLS listing website like Realtor or Zillow and pull up the comps from there. And then go ahead and look at what are some differences between those comps, too. Maybe one property has a garage, one doesn’t, kind of take those into your measurements there.

Ashley:
Then when you meet the appraiser, bring all the information you have. So if there was a new roof put on, there was upgrades done to the property, bring that with you. Maybe if you own property down the road, or you know somebody who does, and they had an appraisal done, and it works in your favor, bring a copy of that appraisal. So it goes both ways. Some appraisers will take as much information as you can give them and say, “Oh wow, thank you. This is going to make my job so much easier.” Some will be like, “Nope. No thanks. I don’t want to even look at it.” But might as well be prepared if it’s somebody that’s going to take the information that you want. As far as the appraisal coming back lower than you want it to, I don’t personally have any experience, and that’s why I’m going to turn it over to Tony. So my little tips were just to help you get prepared for the appraisal, and now Tony’s going to actually help you with what happens when the appraisal does not come back how you want it.

Tony:
Yeah. And Ashley, all fantastic points. I appreciate you sharing that with the listeners, and Montes, to kind of go back to your initial question as well, it actually isn’t that crazy for a seller to ask that of a buyer. So it is common that if there’s kind of this bidding war situation going on, that the purchase price exceeds what the property will appraise for, and there’s a name for that. It’s called the appraisal gap. And we saw a lot of this happening over the last 12 months as the market went bonkers, and there was multiple offers, multiple bidding, people bidding on the same property. You saw a lot where the properties were getting placed under contract for a price that was potentially significantly higher than what the property would appraise for. So in a market like this, Montes, it is common. It’s not that crazy the seller to ask that from the seller.

Tony:
And a lot of buyers, when they’re submitting offers in a competitive market, they’ll even include in their initial offer what appraisal gap they feel that they’d be willing to, they’d be willing to go up to, but say that you feel that the appraisal just came in low, right? Not necessarily that you went way over what it was valued at. If you feel that it came in low, you can challenge an appraisal. Okay? We have you successfully challenged a few appraisals, and what we were able to point out was some discrepancies in the report that the appraiser put together. So for example, one that we just did, the appraiser had the square footage off by, I think, almost 200 square feet, right? And that makes a difference in what the value of the property is. The comps that the appraiser chose, we found other more similar properties, better comps, and the same mile radius that the appraiser used that he just overlooked for whatever reason.

Tony:
So find holes in the appraiser’s report that you can point to say, “Hey, here’s an inconsistency here. Or here’s an inconsistency here. Or here’s a better appraisal comp here, or here is some information that was incorrect.” And if you can push back, sometimes the appraiser will admit and make those changes, other times I’ve had it to where you can actually get a second appraisal ordered, and then if all else fails, maybe it’s just about finding a different lender, right? If the lender isn’t willing to jump through those hoops to help you fight that appraisal, you can always go out, find a different lender, they’ll be able to reorder another appraiser. They’ll be able to order another appraisal from another appraiser which will help you hopefully get a better opinion of the value of the property. So that’s what we’ve done in the past to help us get around some of these appraisal gaps that we’ve seen. But all else fails, you might, Montes, your friend might just have to come out of pocket to actually cover the difference between the purchase price and the appraisal price.

Ashley:
Yeah. And I think the thing to take away from this episode is to at least try to dispute that appraisal if that does happen, where there is that gap, the difference. Do what you can to try to get a new appraisal or have the appraiser re-look at his configuration and what he computed as the appraised value.

Ashley:
Well, thank you guys so much for joining us for this episode of Real Estate Rookie. You guys can send us a DM on Instagram or leave a message in the Real Estate Rookie Facebook group. And if you guys are enjoying the show, please leave us a five star review on your favorite podcast platform.

Ashley:
I’m Ashley at Wealth from Rentals and he’s Tony at Tony J. Robinson. Thank you guys so much for listening.