Disagreement with Appraisal

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We're refinancing and trying to avoid PMI. The appraisal came back lower than we would have liked,

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Dealt with the exact same thing a year ago...

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Do I have any recourse in disputing the appraisal outside of just canceling the refi?

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Advice I was given and it worked was to call the appraiser and talk to him directly. Explain what you are trying to do and where you think that he may have overlooked something. Maybe a measurement or a comp. Even asked that if you send him a few other comps, would he take a look and think about using them in his figures.

He ended up taking a look, admitting he could change a few things, and did so. Said that he was much more open to it since it was a refi and not a sale.


btw, this was after my finance guy spoke with him and they had at it.

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Unfortunately, we were told by the mortgage company that we couldn't see the appraisal prior to their reviewing it, so it has already sort of gone through. Can the appraiser change things at this point?

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My mortgage guy was cool as shite, so he may have done things differently.

But he sent me a copy of it, I looked at it and told him there were errors, thats when he tried to take care of it himself and got shut down. He had to send a formal request to the appraisal company to have it looked at.

He then told me that he couldn't do anything, but I could call the guy and just talk to him man to man. I did that and asked if I could email him the diagram where I think he made errors and then send over a few other comps that I thought were more appropriate. He agreed to take a look.

After looking, he said "Ok, I can do that for you, but you need to formally submit a request for me to change it". So my guy had to do what he originally did and submit the request, the guy then made the corrections and returned it.

Like I said, you just have to be genuine with the appraiser and say something like "I know this isn't my profession and you are a lot more experienced, but I think there may be a few issues in the appraisal and I was hoping you could look at them since we really need to get to X dollars on our refi" Make sure he knows that it isn't for a sale, that it is for you.

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I email the appraiser very politely and never heard back.

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Yeah, I said screw the email, I found his phone number...

At first, I was going to go in guns a blazing, but my finance guy told me to be extremely nice and play the innocent homeowner role. It actually worked.

How is it appraisal with regard to what the tax assessor has it peg at? How much more is the appraisal than what your house insured for?

Apraisers no longer have to keep finance companies happy to get referral work. And they know they are unlikely to get sued for appraising a property too low, whereas overstating the value can leave them exposed to law suits. Thus, they choose to err on the side of caution.

The problem is that many appraisers are just plain lazy. They do not look for unique features of properties, or circumstances of sales, that distinguish them from comps, and every piece of property is unique, as is every sale.

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How is it appraisal with regard to what the tax assessor has it peg at? How much more is the appraisal than what your house insured for?

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Keep low appraisal to give to tax assessor if paying more. Ins is cost to rebuild. Varies