Paul Smith Appraisal Services

Terrible. Paul contacted me prior to the appraisal and told me what our house was worth before even coming to the house. At the end of his visit to our house, he said his initial valuation of our home was wrong. Once we got the appraisal, we found factual errors in the appraisal. We asked the mortgage company to address this and after two rounds of "corrections" there were still factual errors in the appraisal. Each time the valuation of our home was changed. The last straw was when the final appraisal arrived and Paul had valued homes that were newer than ours at a higher value but then also valued a much older home at a higher value than ours. We thought maybe we just did not understand the process or the data or the model or something so we asked Paul to walk us through the appraisal so we could fully understand what we were seeing because it appeared to us that Paul had decided on the price of our home and no matter what changes were made to the appraisal or different comps were used (he originally missed every single comp that had closed within the last six weeks around our home) he was not changing the price. When asked for a detailed explanation, which he offered to do for us if we just called him, he refused to discuss the appraisal with us and directed us back to the lender who promptly told us that we had to talk to Paul if we had any questions about the appraisal. In the end, instead of correcting the appraisal after three go rounds or even trying to walk us through the appraisal details, we were just given a refund along with an insulting email. UPDATE: We decided to try refinancing again after our bad appraisal experience. The next appraiser used current comps and valued our home $88,000 (15%) higher than Paul.