The Pyscho Appraiser from Hades

Ok, the psycho appraiser really lives in Marion, but he acts like he's from Hades...

One of the gazillion things that goes into buying a home is that it needs to be appraised so the lender knows the house is worth the amount they're loaning you (go figure).

We had the new house in Makanda appraised last week, and expect to hear the results today. So we were suprized to get a phone call at 7:20 am yesterday from an appraiser asking us how he could get into the house to appraise it. James told him he needed to call our realtor, (I'll call her Dee)--it's not like we have a key, and we live 2 hours away.

Later, Dee called to tell me we had a problem. It turns out that appraiser was not the one who appraised ths house last week, but a second one. Since each appraisal costs upwards of $300 and we have to pay for this, we certainly don't want to get another bill.

The first thing I did was call my lender, to see if they had ordered this second appraisal. They said no, that the first one was complete and was due tomorrow (now today).

Then, I used caller ID to call the appraiser directly (I'll call him PAH since"Pscyho Appraiser from Hades" and Mephistopheles take too long to type). What a rude shock. I identified myself as the home buyer and asked why he was trying to appraise the house, also telling him that our lender had not ordered a second appraisal. In short, he told me that there was nothing I could do about it, to not "take it personal", but he had an order and was going to appraise it, and I would pay for it regardless. "That's life." he told me.

He shouldn't have told me there was nothing I could do about it.

I called Dee again, and found out this appraiser has a history of causing problems for realtors in the area (in fact, he was the only realtor Dee specifically didn't want to deal with, and we had asked our lender to not use him. Regardless of the agreed on selling price, PAH wants to make a statement, and always assesses the home value as $15K less. This often creates problems in securing a loan on the house. He has a personal quest to lower the "inflated" property values in Carbondale.

I wasted a good portion of the day, hearing from Dee that PAH was repeatedly calling her and the seller's agent to get into the house. The seller's agent actually went to the house and removed the lock box so he couldn't get into the house, and all of Dee's agency were under strict orders to not give him a key to the place. PAH even phoned later that afternoon and pretended to be a buyer who wanted to tour the house (he fessed up when Dee told him it was under contract and not open for showings) while I tried to reach my lender to find out exactly what was going on, and to make sure I wasn't going to pay for a second appraisal.

Finally, the lender called me back. It turns out PAH had originally won the bid to assess our house, but when our loan agent found out about his history, she canceled his order and gave it to a different assesssor (this was back on 8/4). Why he had waited this long after the canceled order to try and assess the house is a mystery. I told the loan agent about his attitude with me, and how he was trying to trick my agent into letting him in, she said she was going to make sure he would never get any business from their company again. She wrote an email and told me that he had been contacted and told to stop.

I guess there was something I could do after all.