Nothing is impossible...

“Nothing is impossible. Some things are just less likely than others.” (Jonathan Winters), from the Jack’s Winning Words Blog. Like Jack, I always enjoyed Jonathon Winters’ humor and remember his TV show. He made up some great characters to use in his comedy routines.

This week I’m trying to get two deals to the closing table. Neither is impossible, but one is more likely than the other. The one that is likely is one where we ran into a medical emergence that postponed a closing last week. Now we’re dealing with overnighting documents back and forth and other issues that, while inconvenient, are certainly not impossible. The other was delayed at the last minute due to lender concerns with the appraisal and the hideous process that has taken hold since HVCC was enacted.

The HVCC law, which had the good intention of removing undue lender pressures from appraisers has resulted in a convoluted and not well understood process of dealing through appraisal management companies to insure an arms-length distance between the lenders and the appraisers. That has added cost and time to the process, as well as having the unintended result of some out-of-area appraisers being assigned to do the work and not having local market knowledge.

In my case the appraiser apparently turned in an appraisal that the lender’s underwriter isn’t happy with; so, the underwriter has ordered the appraiser to submit more or different “comps” to justify the appraisal (whatever it turned out to be). Normally that wouldn’t be a problem, but in this case the original appraisal order took over two weeks to get done and the results took another week to get back to the lender and now they are ordering more work that will add a week or two more. We were supposed to close last week. The HVCC law was good in its intentions, but the bureaucracy that is had created is a nightmare. So it appears less likely that we’ll actually close that deal this week...but not impossible.