Hamilton County Ohio
We feel completely helpless due to a scenario with a refinance.
We purchased the house in 2023 with a 7% interest. At the time we had great credit and a large amount of cash so we paid a 200k down payment. The house is in a small Suburb of Cincinnati with the 2nd best public school system in the state, and top 100 in the country so we felt that was a safe investment to keep our payment lower since properties in this town only go up.
Fast forward a few years and we now have twins which have had medical issues so we have medical debt and have run up our credit cards. Our scores are 668 and 681 right now due to debt to income, so our only option is for an FHA refinance.
The appraisal company sent someone who wasn’t fully licensed and long story short they valued our home at over 100k less than what we were expecting. We had a realtor do an evaluation for us with comps strictly to our small town despite there being dozens if you go outside of our small down that show the property being valued somewhere in the 490-600k range.
Turns out the primary comp that the appraisal company used was for a house 2 streets behind us that was sold for 300k as a tear down, there is now a 1.5M house on that lot.
We were expecting the valuation to be somewhere in the 480-500 in order to pay off our current debt, but it was appraised at 370. The valuation letter by the realtor says our property is worth 485 with all 5 comps less than 1 mile from our property.
We have done 2 appeals with the lender and they have told us that all of our comps and paperwork lines up with the higher value, but due to it being FHA they can’t override the appraisal company.
So we either need to wait 6 months and start over, or accept now is what we’re being told.
Is there any thing we are missing? Is there anything that can be done?