Banking problems

[Jake Bolen]

This will probably ramble on a bit, but I have a predicament. Currently, my wife and I own one small three bay self serve car wash and a Fourplex. Last year I was interested in adding another (larger) car wash when one went up for sale. We negotiated a bit and signed a contract that was contingent on appraisal and elevation. We were told that the car wash was in a flood plain (the current owner built it and did not use a bank so no insurance was required) so I purchased the elevation certificate for $600 to find out how much insurance would be. The bank that I have my current loan through said that they should be able to do another separate loan for us. The bank ordered the appraisal for $2000. Not surprisingly the appraisal came in at the exact number that was on the contract. A week later we found that the car wash was just barely below the flood plain. I shopped around for insurance and the cheapest we could find was $14000 (that’s FOURTEEN thousand) per year. That made the deal a bad one and we backed out of the contract because of the elevation. I moved on and ended up purchasing a Fourplex that cash flows around $500 per month. A few months later I see that the bank has added $2000 to my current loan for an appraisal. After a few phone calls and emails they said they would remove the $2000 and send us an invoice in that amount. Has anyone run into this before? How should I move forward with handling this? Has the bank done something illegal by arbitrarily increasing my current mortgage with them on an unassociated loan?  Is the bank responsible for the $2000?

Thank you for any advice you can give.

Jake