Another Appraiser Nightmare

[Ed O.]

I think this place could be a great place to have a blacklist of appraisers after my recent experience. I know the admin is afraid of legal consequences, so does one exist, a black list of garbage appraisers?

I recently had a woman (over the years, I've had appraisals done by women 2 times, got slaughtered 2 times - just sayin) appraise 3 rental properties with the ultimate goal of refinancing.

She gave me the typical, "we don't know what the values will be," nonsense and then proceeded to value the properties at approximately 50% of their market value after looking at them.

Of course, it would be reasonable to ask if I was in touch with the values in my specific market, and I had to prove it to myself.

The neighborhood has a very limited number of retail sales. I was able to identify a home (same neighborhood, block, etc), a stone's throw away from my homes that sold for 61k about 45 days ago. I can reasonably say that the homes this lady appraised are equal or superior to the sales comp I found with my limited resources.

The 3 homes she appraised all had some unique traits as well, one was a 4/1 on a double lot, one was a 3/1 with a partially finished basement, the last one was a 3/2. Magically, the lazy appraiser brought them all in at 30k.

I'm now out 1k for this womans bogus attempt at valuating my property.

How do I bring her inability to the attention of people that matter? I really take the position that she called it in on these appraisals and now I'm stuck with the resulting headaches.

I have not been able to get my hands on the appraisals but expect to be able to on Monday. It will be very interesting to see. I'm sure I'll have more comps by then as well.

Any advice would be appreciated.

[Phillip Dwyer]

Read through the appraisals thoroughly once you get copies. Look for errors. Research the sales used in the appraisal. Research the rentals used in the income approach. If you have sufficient data to support a different conclusion, talk to your lender about asking the original appraiser to reconsider or order new appraisals. If the appraiser did an obviously horrible job, I would ask the lender to eat the cost on the new appraisals.
In my nearly 10 years of appraisal experience, I've found most appraisal reconsideration requests are bogus. The new data supplied by the borrower or agents is usually garbage. In the very few instances where data or information was supplied after appraisal that I missed or I didn't have acces to, I revised my appraisal. So, if you have legitimate information to strongly support a different conclusion go for it. However, if you simply "feel" like your properties are worth more, you're probably out of luck.