When you are selling your home, there are a million things to do, and a home appraisal is one of them. Even when you have your offer, the deadly hasn’t been done yet. There are a number of steps ahead of you that could affect whether you close, and one of those is the home appraisal. Getting the home appraisal is a process where a professional assessor figures out the value of a home with precision. The appraiser must be licensed in order to perform the appraisal. They will have many years of experience in appraising homes, and they know the complete process for creating an appraisal.

Why Is a Home Appraisal Needed?

When a home appraisal is required, it is the mortgage lender who will lend to the buyer that orders it to be done. Since they will be lending the money for the home, they have to be sure of what the home is actually worth before doing so. Otherwise, they could end up lending more than the house is actually worth and potentially lose a lot of money.

If the home appraisal is done, and it comes in at less than the agreed price for the home, the buyer will have to make up the difference themselves or get you to agree to a lower price for the home. If they can’t do either of these things, they can get out of the purchase deal and get their earnest money back. This is because offers are generally made with a contingency about the appraisal amount.

It may seem as if it would be rare for the appraisal price to cause a problem with the closing, but it’s actually fairly common. This is especially true when there is a seller’s market that’s hot. When this is the case, prices can go up easily, especially if more than one potential buyer gets into a bidding war for the property. A home appraisal issue can cause major delays in the closing of a property. It’s important to know about home appraisals so that you can help the process go through as easily as possible. Knowing what to expect from the process can be helpful.

What Can You Expect From Your Home Appraisal?

The entire process of the appraisal requires about two weeks to complete. The appraiser will look at the size of your home, its condition, and any features it has. Any moveable items in or outside the home, as well as decor pieces, aren’t counted in the value of the home. If you get a home appraisal for a refinance, it works the same way as when the home is being sold.

If there is a low appraisal, there are ways to challenge the appraisal, or you can work around it by changing the deal or the amount of it that will be financed. There are ways that you can get a better appraisal value by putting in some time and effort. When the value of the home is being appraised, every aspect of the property is considered when coming up with the value of it. By fixing it up a little, you may add to the value reported in the appraisal report.

Things that can possibly be considered as a part of the home’s value can include features like a pool, cabana, the total square footage, the type of foundation it has, the materials it’s built with, and how many bedrooms and bathrooms it has. Also considered are extra spaces like attics, crawlspaces, and basements, any cosmetic updates, and any problems like items that need to be fixed. Outside of the home itself, the setting of the home, its zoning, the size of the lot, and the condition of the driveway can all factor into its value.

The two weeks that are needed for the home appraisal are for the home to be appraised. It may take a couple of weeks longer for you to get the report. The amount of time your property takes to be appraised will depend a lot on how complicated the property and the appraisal are. To begin, the lender asks for the home appraisal to be done by a specific appraiser or from an appraisal management company. They then accept the job to do the appraisal. Then, the appraiser conducts research on the property by looking through various public records.

The appraiser gets all of the details about the property such as the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, the square footage, etc. Then, they will look at comparable properties that have been sold in the area recently. Those comparable sales, called the comps, are used to come up with the true value of the home. The appraiser also looks at any features your home has that the other homes don’t and ones that they have that yours doesn’t. This will move the appraised value up or down accordingly.

After all of this, the appraiser makes an appointment to go in and see the home in person. Depending on how large the home is and how complicated the property is, this can take as little as half an hour or less, or it could take a couple of hours to complete. The appraiser then creates their appraisal report of the property. They generally use a form called the Uniform Residential Appraisal Report to prepare it. The form is then sent to the lender for it to be reviewed. And, by law, the lender has to send a copy of this report to the property’s loan applicant as soon as possible.

Contact Us for a Home Appraisal

When you need a home appraisal for a property for any reason, call us at AmeriMac Appraisal Management to set up your appraisal.