REFUSE TO USE THIS REAL ESTATE APPRAISAL COMPANY FOR ANY UPCOMING TRANSACTIONS OR YOU MAY LOSE THE MORTGAGE U R APPLYING FOR LIKE I DID
As an active residential realtor for ten years, I've successfully priced many homes for selling and buying clients, so I certainly understand the pricing-process; while an appraiser's approach is somewhat different from a Realtor's, we usually end up in the same place. I purchased a home, 36 miles north of Miami (they sent a Miami appraiser!), about 1 1/2 years ago with a substantial down payment (33% of the purchase price) after which I put $61,000 into it making improvements, When I recently suffered a stroke, I decided to tap the growing equity I had in the home to pay my medical expenses and to allow me to take advantage of today's significantly lower interest rates, so I applied for a new HUD-insured mortgage to refinance my existing mortgage, and Class Valuations was assigned as the appraiser for that mortgage. I knew my equity would be considerable as a result of my large down payment, plus the substantial improvements I had made, on top of the 12 month general appreciation of real estate in my area, estimated to be between approximately 5-10% by the major real estate value-estimating websites (Realtor.com, Redfin.com, Zillow.com), all of whom put a current value on my home, without awareness of the improvements I had made, that were significantly higher than that of Class Valuations, whose evaluation came in a shocking 007%, or $3000, higher than my original purchase price of the home.
Like most appraisal companies Class Valuations allows for one appeal of their valuation if the client does not believe the outcome is accurate. So I mounted an appeal through my loan officer, by first thoroughly researching the appraiser's comps (and providing comps that I believed more accurately reflected my home's value (all were recent sales, near my home and were roughly the same age, with similar square footage and the same number of beds/bths as my home and equal in "finish".) I bounced my thinking thru my loan officer and he agreed that I presented a compelling case as to why the home was worth significantly more than their appraised value. In mounting my appeal I naively thought the appraiser would place more importance on developing an accurate appraisal, by at least going through the steps of looking at the comps I provided and making his pricing adjustments accordingly, rather than simply trying to defend his own credibility by dismissing my comps out of hand with incorrect and/or nonsensical rationales as he did...specifically,
* he said of the first and second comp that I provided (sold 7/9/2020 and 7/30/2020, respectively), that they were not considered good indicators of current market value vs. his comps, which he claimed were more recent sales, which was not true: his comp #1 sold in 6/2020, his comp #2 also sold in 6/2020, his comp #3 sold in 7/2020, his comp #4 sold in 6/2020 and his comp# 5 sold in 11/2019!! In the original appraisal he justified using this year-old comp in that he couldn't find sufficient recent sales in my area, yet elsewhere in the report he said our market was sufficiently active to do an accurate appraisal, supporting that statement by saying he found 17 different comps
* he rejected my comp #3 saying that it backed up to a "busy" street and said that "therefore it was not considered a good indicator of current market values"( hardly a busy street,) .....yet one of the comps he used in his original appraisal also backed up to the very same street, which he seemed to think was fine at the time in that he did not make any adjustments on that basis (comp #5), and another one of his, (comp #4), backed up to a much busier 4-lane thru-way), which runs from the Everglades to the ocean, passing thru several different towns; truly a transportation artery, which he didn't seem to have a problem with, and made no adjustments for (Atlantic Blvd.).
* He rejected yet another one of my comps (comp #4) as also being on a busy street *across from a major transportation artery", yet it clearly sits in the middle of a subdivision of similar homes, nowhere near any busy streets).
* He did not even bother to address the other concerns mentioned in my appeal .that the two comps he heavily weighted in his original assessment, #'s 1 &5, were not indicative of current value in that #1 was a distressed sale, being a corporate owned "flip" that had languished on the market for almost three years before finding a buyer, and the comp #5 was the aforementioned year-old comp;
So, I did not get the requested re-appraisal and lost my one appeal, since he couldn't be bothered to take the steps required for a reassessment. And given that this was a HUD-insured loan, my loan officer explained that this appraisal would "attach" to my home, and I could not even pay to get a new appraisal for 4 months, killing my ability to tap my equity when I most needed it. read more