If someone told you that the first level of your home was an unfinished basement, and did not count towards the livable square footage of your home, would you be upset? It would be as if someone arbitrarily erased part of your home, and made it smaller than it really was! This is a really important story Read the rest of this entry »
I am working on an interesting loan that will make for a good case study someday, and I think homebuyers and Realtors will find it interesting too.
I am doing a loan for a homebuyer to buy a single family detached home in Falls Church, Virginia. The sales price was a little over $500,000 and the new loan is a Conventional Fixed rate 80% loan-to-value loan, which of course means we are subject to the HVCC rules. So I ordered the appraisal from the bank's Appraisal Management Company (AMC).
For once, the appraiser was local, from Falls Church, VA so we all figured this appraiser would know the local marketplace and that we would be getting an accurate and fair appraisal. But the appraisal came in several weeks later at a price approximately $35,000 lower than the sales price. The seller was angry, the Realtors were upset, and the buyer was confused. Read the rest of this entry »