The House the Bank Said Couldn't Be Financed

By Joshua Holt

Meet Joshua, a licensed real estate professional and accomplished broker. As the forward-thinking leader of the Holt Real Estate Team, he has forged a strategic alliance with Keller Williams and PLACE to deliver on Our Promise.

Imagine you’re selling your home. You have a buyer, an accepted offer, everything moving forward, and then the appraiser says the house cannot be financed at all. Not the buyer’s credit, the house itself. That’s exactly where one of our sellers recently found themselves, and how we dug it out is the whole reason you want a real agent in your corner.

Here’s the situation. We were representing a seller with a wonderful old farmhouse, built in 1886, that she’d owned for 24 years. We listed it as-is. Everyone knew going in that there were condition items, that was never hidden, and we found a buyer who loved the house and was completely comfortable taking it as-is.

Then the appraisal came back. The appraiser rated the home’s condition so low that they declared it non-financeable, and this wasn’t a strict government loan program; it was a standard conventional mortgage. We had a willing seller, a willing buyer, an accepted offer, and a house the bank would not lend on until a long list of items was addressed.

An appraisal repair list is a starting point, not a bill. This is the first thing most homeowners get wrong. The list we received was long: a new roof and doors on a detached garage, a basement moisture inspection, wood repaired around the upper windows, damaged ceilings fixed in an unfinished back corner, and a handrail added.

Our instinct is never to start writing checks. It’s to ask, on every single item, whether it genuinely needs to happen or whether there’s another way. Treat that whole list as mandatory, and you can spend tens of thousands of dollars, much of it on work that never actually had to be done.

Working the list is where an agent earns their keep. Let us show you what that looked like here, because a homeowner on their own would rarely pull it off. That detached garage, the appraiser wanted re-roofed with new doors, which we had removed from the requirements entirely, because it was detached and carried essentially no value to the appraisal. The basement moisture concern turned out to be simple discharge from the water softener rather than water intrusion, and we secured a plumber’s statement to prove it.

On the genuine repairs, the windows, the ceiling, and the handrail, we worked directly with the buyer, who agreed to take some of them on. Each of those moves either saved our seller money or saved the deal, and none of them are obvious unless this is what you do every day.

Sometimes you have to do the appraiser’s homework for them. Here’s the part that really shows the difference between a professional and a checklist. The appraiser wanted an entire second bathroom added to the house. Their reasoning was that they couldn’t find comparable sales for a five-bedroom, one-bathroom home, so making it a two-bathroom home would be easier to value. A homeowner alone might actually have built that bathroom, an enormous and unnecessary expense.

Instead, we went out and found comparable five-bedroom, one-bath sales ourselves, sent them over, and eliminated the demand entirely. No second bathroom needed. That single move spared our seller a huge, pointless renovation. With the real repairs handled, the home appraised above the contract price, and the deal is clearing its final steps toward closing.

Here’s what we want you to take from this. When you sell a home, especially an older one with character and a few quirks, plenty can go sideways after you’re already under contract, and much of it happens in places a homeowner selling alone would never think to push back on. The difference between losing the deal or overspending by tens of thousands and reaching the closing table often comes down to who is working the problem on your behalf.

That’s exactly what we do. If you have a home you think might be tricky to sell, or you simply want it handled by people who know how to fight for you, call or text us at 608-345-6594, email us at info@holtrealestateteam.com, or visit holtrealestateteam.com. Let’s make sure your sale gets to the finish line, no matter what surprises come up along the way.