What is a VA loan appraisal waiver? Is that even real?

The answer is yes. My name’s Evan Kaufman, your VA loan originator.

So, if you ultimately just had a VA appraisal done and you happen to get it back and it’s subject to repairs… it can happen.

This means the appraiser has gone out there, looked at the home, and part of a VA loan appraisal process is to make sure that the home is, what they like to say, habitable. It meets some certain standards.

If it comes back and it has a little line that says, ‘Hey, we think it’s worth X subject to these repairs’ and it says, a sidewalk, a railing, whatever, little different things – I like to say big things I would point out: peeling paint, making sure windows open, those kinds of things.

If they say it’s subject to items, sometimes people assume, ‘Oh no, it’s end all, be all, it has to be done, no matter what.’

That’s not necessarily the case.

Sometimes, ultimately, if veterans are in that position and they’re trying to get the sellers to complete those repairs because, remember, those repairs have to be completed generally to make sure that appraiser will sign off on the appraisal so we can move forward to close.

But if, for some reason, they’re at a standstill, technically buyers can request a waiver from the VA.

How does that work?

Well, you want to work through your lender to ask them, ‘Hey, is it possible if we try to get these subject two items waived by the VA?’

Now, I’ll say right up front, there’s no guarantees at all because, remember, the whole point of that subject to being in there is to ideally help make the property better for the veteran.

But the reality is some of those things can be waived by the VA and here’s how that works.

You work with your lender to say, ‘Hey, is it possible that we can get one of those things waived?’

Because the deal is, the VA wants a waiver request truly coming from the buyer, the veteran, the member who’s purchasing the home themselves.

We deal with this for our clients if they want to do this directly.

How it’ll often work, using our experience:

‘Hey, we want to try to see if we can get those waived.’

‘Okay, we’ve got some good formats so we can give you for letters if you like how this is written or you want to write out what you want to have waived requests, wonderful. Sign that and we’ll present that to the VA to see if they’ll grant that waiver request.’

So sometimes for some of those little things the VA will look at that and go, ‘Okay, you know what? They’ll have a staff-level reviewer, another reviewer look at it and if they feel comfortable granting it, they can grant a waiver for some of those subject two items.’

The big caveat, of course, is don’t just get caught on assuming that they’re going to waive everything under the sun.

But we have seen it done and we have seen it work before.

We’ve seen small things and big things, like driveways having issues where they got waived before because, for example, that military family that was moving in, if the deal blew up and they were going to be out of a house or having issues with their earnest money, even with the clause, I get it, they’re still having issues there.

They all of a sudden might have been out of a home and living in another place for a while with all their kids and they wrote a nice letter for it, ‘Hey, is it possible that we can waive some items?’

And it can be done.

Just remember it’s case by case basis.

The VA needs to review it.

But here’s the deal: sometimes if people assume that those are like rare unicorns and they’re not real… I’ve heard, maybe that could happen… it’s more like an albino squirrel. They’re rare, but I have seen one before. They are real.

VA loan waiver appraisal process. Hope that explains a little bit where if you run into those weird issues where you just come into heads with the seller and they’re not willing to fix those subject two items on a VA appraisal, know that there is a potential process and ideally, you should be working with the lender that gets it.

If you’re having trouble with that, I’m always here to ideally help you out. Hope this helps explain that. You guys take care.