Those wonderful, fun loving appraisers

Appraisers have gotten so conservative they are getting blamed by unhappy borrowers who can’t get loans and folks in the mortgage business for killing sales inflicting more pain in a miserable market.

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the issue, featuring a California couple who shelled out $635,000 for a 3,100 square foot Victorian two years ago.

The new appraisal – a stunning $250,000. Needless to say, it’s goodbye to their hopes of refinancing their mortgage and saving $400 a month

Maybe it’s a little much to throw blame for the stinky real estate market on appraisers, who appear to be a convenient target anytime things go wrong.

Still, I recently saw firsthand this more conservative approach in action.

My wife and I just finished converting our construction loan on our Natick fixer-upper, which we just put a two-story addition onto, into a traditional, 30-year mortgage.

But not without one minor scare. A new appraisal on the completed property came in $5,000 lower than the one the bank had commissioned last year when our home improvement project was ramping up.

There was talk of starting the whole loan process. I had fears that, within days of wrapping up the last piece of our epic home improvement project, my wife and I were about to get swallowed up into some bank bureaucratic hell zone.

Not so. We threw an extra $5,000 into the deal, lowered the amount we owned, and signed the paperwork.

I guess I was one of the lucky ones.