Funny How the Appraiser Calls AFTER the Home Inspection
One of my pet peeves, as a top producing Bristow Real Estate Agent, is how deadlines are handled by buyer agents on my listings. Let's start with the fact that all deadlines in our contract, unless specified otherwise in writing, run the date of final acceptance and delivery to all parties. We call that the date of ratification. Home inspections are usually given ten days max and a seven day max negotiation period, followed by a day or two right to void. Meanwhile appraisal contingencies are about twenty-one to twenty-four days. And in my experience, it takes about a week from teh time the appraiser has been at the property to turn in the appraisal to the buyer's lender.
Knowing these fact, you would think that buyer agents would advise their clients to schedule the home inspection and appraisal ASAP. Yet, time and again, I am dumbfounded when miraculously, I won't hear from an appraiser until after the home inspection and any repairs have been negotiated. If a buyer has a twenty-one day appraisal contingency, they are putting your appraiser in quite a pickle to get the job done. But ultimately, they are putting themselves in a pickle as all deadlines fall on the buyer's head.
Imagine how much smoother home inspection negotiations might go with a seller if they weren't worrying about what was around the corner at the appraisal? I represented a Bristow seller recently where appraisal was a major concern for both parties. Naturally, the appraisal order was delayed, but not until the very end. Just until after the inspection. By that point in time, the buyer and seller were in tough negotiations. Buyers wanted their last chance at getting repair money, which they felt they deserved for paying so much for the home. Well, that "paying so much for the home," was yet to be determined. The appraisal came in when the seller finally made a counter tying any repair credit to the home appraising for sales price. I'm still not sure how that upset the buyers, as their entire argument was how much they were paying for the home.
The argument buyers and their agents will use is that buyers don't want to be out money ordered for an appraisal if the deal falls through on home inspection. Let me just say, if that is a legitimate concern, based on a poor condition of the property, write a much longer time frame for appraisal. Otherwise, know that the inspection deadline being over doesn't kick off the beginning of the appraisal contingency. These run concurrently. And if you are a serious buyer, you should pay for all of them up front.
My seller clients are going to be getting some pro tips on how to deal with this approach to deadlines when they negotiate their purchase offers. It's a poor business tactic and leaves too many unanswered questions at a time when both parties deserve the most information they can have.
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