It is vitally important to listen to your real estate agent when selling your home, particularly in the arena of the price of the home. Sometimes a home will be priced at what the homeowner wants, instead of what the market is bearing. This is the set up for a potentially dramatic situation in which the homeowner may end up frustrated and disappointed, all because they probably ignored the advice the real estate agent provided to them.
An appraisal is based on the most recent market data for homes or land that are most similar to the subject property. In other words, your home is being compared to homes like it, which have sold in your area. Now, "like it" can be a vague and confusing term, but we are not talking about siding materials or paint color. We are talking about square footage, lot size, location, garage size, age and a few other important characteristics. That goes without saying that the building structures themselves must also be similar. You cannot compare a manufactured home to a stick built home, or a log home to a masonry home. They have to be similar in as many categories as possible.
Once the appraiser determines how many similar homes have sold in your area in the last six months, other outlying factors are included or excluded. These may include things the presence or absence of hot tubs, certain kinds of heating systems, air conditioning or roofing materials. All of these things may factor into exactly how much the appraiser determines your home to be worth.
Now, let us just assume your home is just like 6 other properties that all sold for "X" amount, but you want "X" plus ten grand. For the sake of simplicity, let us say the buyer wanted to offer you what you were asking for the property, because they "just loved it so much!" They are also like most typical buyers in the American real estate market and do not have much money to put down.
Everything is hunky dory and your real estate transaction is going along just fine. You and the buyers iron out all the contract details and everyone is excited about the closing. You have so many details to nail down before you move and you are starting to feel the strain. Your real estate agent calls and says the appraiser will be out tomorrow. You clean up the house and try to make everything as nice as possible for him when he comes by.
After the appraisal is over and a few days down the road, you get a phone call from your listing agent and he says there is a ten thousand dollar difference between the contracted sales price and the appraised value. Worse yet, it is a negative value. He goes on to tell you that the buyers bank says it will only provide the appraised value for financing and the rest must come from somewhere else.
Believe it or not, this scenario has happened hundreds, if not thousands of times throughout the nation, and many homeowners are left without a clue how to solve the situation or what could have been done to avoid it.
How You Can Fix It
The remedy is actually quite simple. That is to say, the easiest remedy is quite simple. You have your real estate agent write up an addendum that reduces the purchase price so that it lines up with what the buyer's financing will permit. You, the homeowner just write it off completely.
Another way to take care of it would involve you offering to take a note at closing, and agreeing to loan the new home buyer the money from your profits. This will not always work with every bank, if they know about it, and you may end up getting stiffed on it anyway.
How To Avoid It
The easiest way to avoid this is to price your home correctly. Your real estate agent should offer to put together a "Comparative Market Analysis" which will closely follow the same rough guidelines an appraiser would use to establish the value of your home. Keep in mind that these CMAs do become invalid after a few months, so insist upon updated versions every 4 to 8 weeks. If the market is headed down you may need to race it to the bottom just to sell your home, and in today's real estate market that is a common scenario.
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