Real Estate Appraiser

An important aspect of either selling a property at its full value or purchasing a property at less than its full value is having an accurate real estate appraisal. However, you should not think that an appraisal is a full picture of a property’s market value. The primary purpose of a real estate appraisal is to assure lenders that the property for which the loan is being secured is worthy of the loan amount.

In most cases, the lender will have a specific appraiser assigned to properties in your area. In some cases, you may be able to choose from a list of appraisers. The more comfortable the lender is with the appraiser, the more quickly a loan application will be processed.

A good real estate appraisal will have full details of what aspects were considered in the evaluation of the property’s value. Generally, it will include local real estate sales data, property features data, and an estimate of how long it is taking for similar properties in the area to be sold. The property features may be expanded to include special improvements, unique architectural characteristics, and the quality of road accesses. If the property has private road access, the lender will sometimes require an agreement on maintaining the private road.

A common mistake is thinking of appraisers and inspectors as being synonymous. In fact, these two have very different jobs. What they have in common is that they look at properties. However, instead of trying to determine the value of a property, an inspector tries to find flaws with it. So remember that inspectors are there only to figure out whether the properties meet codes or have damages, while appraisers are there to figure out what the properties are each worth. Read the rest of this entry »