Cash Out Refi in Spring Valley, California.

Avid biggerpockets podcast listener

First, I am an I avid biggerpockets listener. I have currently listened to about 60 podcasts since discovering it about a month ago. I am listening constantly to catch up to the current shows (show 182 right now).

Cash-Out Refi

As part of my real estate investment strategy, I am in the middle of trying to do a cash out refinance on a 413k duplex in Spring Valley, California. So far the whole process is failing. I guess that means there is lot that I should be able to learn from this. So I took some risk in believing that my property had appreciated greatly in value since I made the purchase in 2014. I have seen interest rates continue to fall which is an indicator that prices are going up and I asked around at local REI club meetings about the idea of a cash out refi. Mostly everyone agreed it would be smart with these crazy low interest rates. So I figured that I could use the extra capital to implement some new investment strategies I learned on podcast. 

The first problem

The first problem that I ran into is that I have zero faith in the appraiser's level of expertise. I tried to pick his brain during the appraisal about things that I could do to increase property value and he just had nothing to offer. He asked me very specific financial questions in front of my tenant, and overall looked ancient and out of touch with reality. 

One Solution

My loan officer has been great throughout the process. I am trying to get around the appraiser's incompetence by leveraging my loan officer's motivation and talents to contact the underwriter with some comps that I found on zillow of similar properties that have sold recently in my neighborhood. I feel like the appraiser did little to no research on comps and just added a generic and super conservative 3% appreciation per year number to my purchase price. He appraised the property at almost exactly that amount and my loan officer said that we now have to wait for finalization from the underwriter. Thats when I sent the Zillow comps and although it may not work; at least I feel like I am not just handing over the entire process to an unmotivated, out of date, and lack-luster appraiser. I am doing everything I can on my end to make sway the result in my favor. At the end of the day I will either gain a lot of capital to work with or a lot of knowledge on how a cash out refi actually works.