Low appraisal
If you’ve seen my other posts on this journey, hello, it’s me again 😅🙈. I appreciate all the comments and advice I’ve gotten so far. Hopefully I’m back one last time. If you’re new here, house is FSBO, off market and we have no realtor as well. We are just using attorney for closing process.
We had a VA appraisal this past week (Thursday). They declared tidewater and gave homeowner until Monday (yesterday) to submit any comps they may have missed. I should receive the actual report today but the lender called me yesterday and stated the owner never submitted any comps, and stated to them he was told by someone he’d easily be able to get $700k for the house and there’s $40k of lumber they (us the buyer) can cut down if we wanted to.
Our initial offer was $675,000 contingent upon inspection (well, septic, radon and termite) and appraisal. Appraisal came in at $650,000.
We have not asked the homeowner for any closing help so right now we’re paying over $20,000 in closing fees, we went without a realtor because we didn’t want to ask or expect him to pay our realtor since he didn’t have one and with VA loan buyer doesn’t pay commission fees.
We haven’t asked him to fix any issues with the inspection (possible organic growth in HVAC coils & basement under steps near condensation line, elevated levels of radon and other small issues). I am assuming there may be some more when the appraisal comes back such as handrails for some steps outside.
Has anyone successfully gotten their seller to come down without realtors involved? He seemed pretty set in the beginning on the price because he wants to be able to build his new house for basically cash. I feel like we screwed ourselves by him not having a realtor come out and give him an honest review and pricing of the house before we went under contract.
It just doesn’t make sense financially for us to bridge the gap considering there are immediate repairs that need to be made, we have no closing help and we still have to get our home ready and fixed up to sell once we’re out.
Edit to add: we haven’t spoken to him yet. I’m trying to figure out how to go about giving the ultimatum essentially.