I recently sold my home and the buyer used an FHA loan. Our market locally has cooled drastically. After a couple months on the market and drastic price cuts our first non insulting offer was an FHA buyer that we accepted. The house was built in 1993. At some point the garage was converted into a bonus room and a two car detached garage was built. Most of the interior had been renovated except the kitchen. To the best of my knowledge the roof was original. Overall the condition of the home was solid with the only real issues was some parts of the vinyl siding was a little wavy and the roofs were at the tail end of their lives. Neither leaked at all, that I know of, but the garage in particular you can just look at and go damn, that’s rough.
The FHA appraiser came by and only had one fix required. The front porch has three brick steps and they wanted a railing put up. That’s it. $400 later and FHA was happy. Their general inspector complained about several completely trivial things they asked for that was a combined $900. Could have probably been done for $300 if I had done it myself but didn’t have time.
All in all it was a completely painless process and have zero regrets selling FHA.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I’ve seen the same thing. The most we’ve dealt with is smoke detectors going off.
When it comes to buying and selling, we haven’t had any problems with FHA loans. I’ve even had sellers choose FHA offers over others when there were multiple bids.
Honestly, the lender matters more than whether it’s FHA or Conventional. A good lender can really make or break a deal!
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Hey, as a loan officer, I can say we all stick to the same rules unless the loan officer works at a bank or a place with extra requirements. What really matters is how good the loan officer is—check their reviews and give them a call before you accept an offer to see how they handle the pre-approval process.
Also, a lot of realtors don’t realize that a conventional appraisal can have conditions too. They often unfairly look down on FHA and VA buyers!
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This is the reality of FHA appraisals. So many agents think that FHA loans are so strict. Not the case for a long time. Safety, structurally sound, and operational. Those are things I would want regardless of my loan type.
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Some agents will fight tooth & nail against literally any additional step b/c they see it as pushing their commission further out. That’s what it comes down to.
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Sounds like most of my FHA deals, very little to nothing is required to be fixed. The requirement of the railing on 3 or more steps is the most common and second is nonfunctional smoke detectors.
Appraisers that do FHA appraisals are appraisers first and foremost. They would probably be the same appraisers who complete appraisals on conventional mortgages.
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A few years back, we sold our house to an FHA buyer. The only thing that popped up was a tiny bit of peeling paint on the outside. I was really glad to sell it to someone who might not have been able to buy a home otherwise. The closing took a bit longer, but it wasn’t a big deal for us.
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Same here. I was warned about FHA, but picked an FHA offer. It went smoothly and nothing additional was required. The house was older, and with all the imperfections you’d expect an older house to have.
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The biggest issue that I see with FHA is that the loan process takes longer. In my experience more than 50% of FHA files don’t close on time.
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I’m a house flipper, and I’ve sold a few older homes, some from before the 1940s and even a few from the 1900s. It can be really tough depending on the appraiser. I should probably make a post about my experiences, but here’s the gist: I had an FHA appraisal come back with over 20 inspection issues, some of which couldn’t even be fixed.
The worst part was that the crawl space had to be 18 inches from the ground to the bottom of the floor joist, but some areas were only 6 inches high. The appraiser ignored my calls for weeks, no matter how many times I tried. Finally, I managed to reach him once, and I jokingly asked if we should dig out the crawl space or lift the house. He said that might be what we’d have to do! So, we decided to walk away from that offer and found a conventional one for a bit less.