Buying A Home
Dear Community,
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Our tech team has launched updates to The Nest today. As a result of these updates, members of the Nest Community will need to change their password in order to continue participating in the community. In addition, The Nest community member's avatars will be replaced with generic default avatars. If you wish to revert to your original avatar, you will need to re-upload it via The Nest.
If you have questions about this, please email help@theknot.com.
Thank you.
Note: This only affects The Nest's community members and will not affect members on The Bump or The Knot.
Comps? First time here!
Hi, all!
It's my first time posting here, but I'm super excited, we're in the process of trying to move into our forever home! A little background, we moved from IL to NM about 8 months ago. We left our starter home when we came out here. We've now found the perfect forever home and everything is good to go, except we're waiting on the appraisal. My real question is that the comps are all over the place, since nothing has been selling in the neighborhood where we're looking. Is anyone familiar with what happens with no real comps in the area? (We bought our last place before the downturn, so we've never dealt with this before.)
Thanks for any and all info 
Re: Comps? First time here!
they do what they can - all our comps were from towns 15 miles away, over a year old, and weren't overly comparable.
but they were enough to get us a loan.
There are values that appraisers can assign to specific features so they might base it off of comps and adjust accordingly - e.g. if a similar house down the street had one more or less bathroom, they could subtract or add a certain amount.
I'm told that the appraisers really do try to meet the number you need. Has your agent expressed any concern? If they aren't worried, I wouldn't be overly concerned. Besides, if the market is slow, a low appraisal might help you get a better deal since the seller would have the same problem in any instance.
we were in a similar situation in terms of not having any recent, truly comparable sales in our neighborhood. they went to a few miles out. we also had a hardass appraiser who didn't take much stock in how upgraded the home is compared to many in the area (lots of original owners from the 50s that have maintained their houses well but have not remodeled at all). so our appraisal came in low, at around 5% less than our purchase price. this seems to be happening a lot in our neighborhood as inventory is low, there are multiple bid offers jacking up selling prices a bit, and it is a market that was hit hard by the crash, price-wise.
seller would not budge on price. because of our hefty down payment, it didn't affect our ability to get the loan nor did it affect our loan amount or rate. the only difference is we were originally going to get half a point refunded to us, but we no longer will be due to our lower LTV.
seller is also buying a house in which their appraisal came in too low. it was multiple bid situation in a very desirable neighborhood, so seller's seller was going to just move onto the next offer if they couldn't get financing lined up. they had to get more cash to have a certain percent down in order for their lender to give them the loan.
lots of possible scenarios, but a low appraisal isn't the end of the world. good luck!