

What If Your Home Appraisal Is Too Low?
You have signed a contract to purchase a house. Your potential lender has qualified you for the mortgage loan, on the condition that the house will appraise high enough to support the loan. Now you have learned that the appraisal has come in too low, and the lender is not prepared to commit the loan. You have a number of options. Let's take this example. Your contract price is $500,000, and you are seeking a loan which will be 80 percent of the purchase price -- or $400,000.

When It Comes To Real Estate, Is It Ever OK To Overpay?
A story broke this week about how Zillow CEO Spencer Rascoff overpaid for his $20 million home. The New York Times called it "ironic" that he paid "over $1 million above its Zestimate" for his 12,732-square-foot Brentwood, CA mansion. Everyone who's had an issue with Zillow's farcical Zestimates calls it "payback." "The next time you're surfing popular real estate listings site Zillow for a new home and stumble across a "Zestimate" - the company's estimate for a property's va