Plunging, good and bad....

No matter what happened, this day was destined to be better than it looked like it was going to be a week ago. I did not have to get dressed up and schlep into a courtroom for a hearing that I was "relieved of my duties" for by that client late on Friday morning. Ethical constraints prevent me from getting into details, but when in doubt, you let a frog do the talking....



That left me with only a default judgment to file, a couple of calls to return, and the rest of the day was for personal things.  Early on, I called our most reliable plumber to take care of the mystery that Lt. Rayumbo kinda solved yesterday; after some phone tag, we worked that out for early this afternoon.

Then a call came in from an unknown local number: the underwriter on the refi. Just a courtesy intro call, to say that everything would take about a week to finalize. After confirming that they likely wouldn't demand some of the bullshitty things we had trouble with two refi's back, I asked if his calling meant the appraisal had been received.

It had. It came in lower than expected. By a lot.  Enough to reduce our loan qualification on value by almost 20K less than we'd expected and with little or no cash out if everything we'd expected to pay out of proceeds still got paid.  We asked to see it.

Dude picked three "comparable" sales- two from behind our house on our side of the street (the opposite side backs up to the 290 interstate) and a third in a near but very different area of this section of the neighborhood. All closed in March of last year- as in right when the pandemic got real around here and showings/closings of properties completely shut down for months. All sold for way less than we'd expected the appraisal to come in at; two sold for less than ours did appraise at.  He noted that one was a better deal than its sale price because it had a fireplace and the seller offered a $10,000 concession on the price. A second had a better bathroom.  No explanation of how the third was different.  A random line in it that he found ours to be "below the predominant value for the area" without saying why.

I was not a happy puppy. Using my mad lawyer skillz and general nosiness about things around here, I did some homework, and found four more recent sales on our own street, all on the side backing up to the expressway, which were comparable in size to our 1451 square feet (save one):

#111, 1529 square feet, sold 11/20 for 250,000

#171, 1481 square feet, sold 9/20 for 260,000

#215, 2001 square feet, sold 11/20 for 240,000

and #137,1432 square feet, just listed and sold in 10 days for, we believe,very close to its $227,000 listing (Eleanor checked and saw it sold at 223K).

I sent these to the mortgage broker, who said he'd pass them on. Then Eleanor got home, and she focused on the mistakes that were clear just about his "inspection" of our place:

-"Foundation"- the appraisal says 0% of the basement is finished. More than a third of the square footage of the house is finished underneath (we got a tape measure out to get the percentage)- with paneling, linoleum floor, electrical outlets and heat registers (which also heat the floor above), a half bath and a bar with a refrigerator behind it.

- Same- he checks "sump pump," which the house does not have nor does it need because of the poured concrete used in the construction of the house (cinderblock foundations are much more prone to the leaks that a sump pump would address).

Eleanor also noticed that he left out the half bath in the basement, but apparently those don't count at least in terms of the official bathroom "count"-  but it may have enhanced his subjective value based on it making the basement more "finishy."

But then, all of these could have been correctly accounted for if he had actually gone into our basement to have a look round. We also had the appraisal from our most recent 2016 refi available, which he did not ask to see; this did not have the detailed interior data, but had the correct identification of it having a basement and 1.5 baths. That valued the home at 160K as of almost five years ago. Values have been flying off the edge of the page since then in our area and price range; that 1481 square foot jobby above sold for 260 after they bought it a couple of years before our last 160K appraisal for just under 170. He also did not even try to work in the value of our solar panels, which went on after the last appraisal, have saved us $1500 a year on our electric bills in recent years, and will be fully paid for when this deal closes.

I'm still optimistic we can get them to come around on the value, if not to the full expectation at least closer to enable more to be paid off and something of a nest egg to come out of it. The biggest woulda-coulda-shoulda is that the bank guy made it out to be a mere formality that we would have no trouble with; the appraiser came on my vaccination day so I wasn't here, and maybe if I'd been here, I could've helped get more of these details across.

Nowhere to go but up....

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That left the final bit of business, where now things have nowhere to go but down again.

Plumber dude got here on time, quickly confirmed that the problem was in the combined drain for both upstairs kitchen and downstairs tub, and had it snaked and flowing freely in under an hour. We're back to the local hardware store's plumbing service that we've relied on for years; on a recent more minor repair, I offered a gig to a small operator I'd actually sued and collected from, and wanted to give something back. He came in as less expensive, but didn't quite do the job completely right and he had to come back to fix the fix.  So we're back to going with who we know and trust.