Patrick Haley never thought he would be arguing to pay more for a house than it was supposedly worth.
Haley, who works in home-construction technology, was in the process of relocating from Texas to North Carolina a few weeks ago when he found his dream home in Charlotte. The $750,000, four-bedroom home spanned 2,700 square feet and backed into a state park.
Haley wanted to be close to family, so he didn’t mind the steep price tag, part of which would be covered with proceeds from the sale of a previous home he had sold in San Antonio.
What he did mind was the appraisal gap. The property appraiser, sent by the lender he was working with, had determined the market value of the home he wanted to buy was just $698,000 – $52,000 less than what he had agreed to pay the seller.
That wouldn’t work for Haley. Lenders need to know the value of a home as a safeguard to ensure that they don’t overextend loans for more than they are worth.
And with the appraised value being lower than the asking price, that left Haley with a gap. He could only take out a mortgage for $698,000, and as the asking price was $52,000 more, he would need to pay the remainder out of his own pocket.
“I also disagreed with that appraisal,” Haley told MarketWatch. The property’s proximity to a state park made it unique. Not many properties like that came up for sale often, he said, so there were no comparable sales on which to base the home’s value.
Haley’s experience shows how tricky the home-appraisal process can be at a time when home sales have stalled, partially due to a lack of homes on the market.
At the same time, since the market has become less competitive, more buyers are finding they have more time to spend on the appraisal process to make sure they are getting a fair price. In March, the National Association of Realtors saw a fall in the share of buyers skipping an appraisal contingency to 19% from 24% the previous month.
An appraisal contingency is a clause that allows the buyer to back out of a deal if the property is appraised at less than the price they agreed to pay the seller. In other words, it’s a way for buyers to avoid overpaying for a house.
When should a home buyer waive a home-appraisal contingency?
During the pandemic, it was more common for buyers to skip the appraisal contingency to expedite the process of buying a home. But in general, waiving the appraisal contingency is not a good idea, real-estate experts told MarketWatch.
“For cash buyers, it is the buyer’s decision,” Lawrence Yun, chief economist at the NAR, told MarketWatch. Nevertheless, an appraisal contingency is “generally advisable unless the property is clearly considered underpriced or multiple offers are expected.”
In most cases, such as Haley’s, the lenders require an appraisal before they can originate a loan. “Most appraisals are at the lender’s request to ensure the loan amount given is not too much,” Yun said. They will require the buyer to pay the cost of the appraisal, which can be between $300 and $500, according to an analysis by LendingTree (TREE), a comparison-shopping site.
What appraisers look for in a home
An appraiser looks at various aspects of a home to gauge its value. These can include the condition the home is in, the square footage and recent home sales in the neighborhood.
Appraisals can be a sensitive process for sellers to navigate. Homeowners who are selling have particularly strong feelings about appraisals that come in lower than they expect. “Homeowners are very often very emotional, and what they think moves the needle doesn’t move the needle at all,” Megan Judd, an Orlando, Fla.-based home appraiser and owner of Metropolis Appraisal Services, told MarketWatch.
Judd, who’s been appraising homes for over 30 years, says the length of time an appraisal takes depends on the property. If she’s evaluating a home that is newly constructed and fairly straightforward, such as a tract home, she would take an hour to do research before she gets to the house, 45 minutes to look through it, 45 minutes to drive around the neighborhood and take photos of comparable properties, and then three to four hours to type the appraisal report out.
“And that’s a very simple one,” Judd said. “I tend to spend a workday and a half, maybe 10 to 12 hours on a complex property – such as if it’s a lakefront property … or anything out of the ordinary.”
How one home buyer resolved an appraisal gap
The appraisal gap is slightly more common among small homes. Roughly 9% of homes in the closing process were appraised below the contract-sales price, according to a report by Cotality that looked at home sales in June 2024, the latest month for which data were available. Nearly a tenth of starter homes were appraised below the contract-sale price, the report said, versus 7.1% of more expensive homes.
The fact that the appraisal gap is higher among starter homes could reflect “a higher risk of overpayment by inexperienced first-time home buyers,” the company said.
Back in North Carolina, the homeowners who were selling their home to Haley were also facing the possibility of their home being undervalued.
Haley, who was a repeat buyer, was not pleased with the number the appraiser came up with, and didn’t think they had done a very thorough job. The person from the appraisal company “never set foot in the home,” Haley said, and didn’t stray farther than 20 feet from where their car was parked outside.
He theoretically had two choices at this point: Either walk away from the home and start looking for another, or get another lender and hope for the home to be appraised at a higher price.
But giving up wasn’t in the cards. Haley needed the appraisal to get the mortgage. He wasn’t in a rush, since the home was being sold off-market by the owners, whom he knew through a family member. He was told to try a different lender, so he went to a local one.
After Haley switched from a national mortgage lender to a local lender that did its own appraisal, the difference was day and night. “Everyone wants my business, so they probably told me what I wanted to hear,” he said, “but at the same time, they were really helpful” in terms of explaining what they said was their different approach to valuing homes like the one he sought to buy.
One way in which this new appraisal differed: The appraiser sent by the local lender looked at homes sold in the neighborhood over a longer period of time since there were few comparable transactions in recent years, rather than looking at homes sold recently in the surrounding areas, some of which were pretty far away. “I don’t think a home in that neighborhood has sold for the last five years,” Haley said, “so there was no direct comparison.”
The lender ended up appraising Haley’s dream home for $785,000 – $100,000 more than what the national lender had estimated – which meant he could get a conventional mortgage to cover the price of the home. Haley is currently under contract for the property.
“We were able to come up with what I thought was a more just appraisal,” Haley said.
