re: How accurate is a home appraisal for the mortgage company?

Now, this is just my experience, but both times that I have paid an appraiser to review my house they have come back significantly higher value than what the bank's appraiser came up with.

I have done this twice on two different houses since 2014 and both times they were about 2 years exactly after the original purchase. Maybe this was somewhat expected in the market conditions, but both times it was a little surprising.

I'm wondering also if you hired an appraiser and specifically told them that you wanted a low value for the purposes of tax value evaluation, would they be able to "work" the numbers down. Maybe I'll try that next year since our county only does evaluations every 7 years.