People sometimes apologize to me when I arrive at their home. The house isn’t clean enough. There are dishes in the sink. The kids left things everywhere. The dog is going to bark. They meant to finish painting that wall. There’s laundry on the bed and, inevitably, someone apologizes for the garage.
I understand why. You’re letting a stranger into your home, and he’s walking around with a camera and measuring equipment, opening doors, taking notes and looking at things. It can feel like you’re being judged. Just so you know, I’m not there to judge how you live.
In fact, many of the things homeowners worry about are things I barely notice. I’m not concerned about whether the beds are made or there are dishes next to the sink. I’m trying to understand the property, and that’s a different kind of looking.
After more than twenty years of appraisal work, I suppose I’ve learned to walk through a house with two sets of eyes. I can see the home in front of me, but I’m also trying to understand the building, the site, how everything works together and how a buyer might experience it. It starts before I ever walk through the front door.
The Observation Starts Outside
When I pull onto a street, I’m already looking around.
What is the neighborhood like? Are the homes generally similar, or does development vary considerably from one property to the next? Is the street quiet, or does it carry substantial traffic? Are there commercial properties nearby? Power lines? Open space? A school? A view of some sort? Something that might affect how buyers respond to this particular location?
Then I get to the property itself. How does the home sit on the site? Is the land level, sloped, wooded, usable? Is there room for parking? On acreage, how much of the property is actually useful to a typical buyer? Is there a shop, barn, pool, accessory dwelling, detached garage or other improvement?
I notice the roof, siding and windows. I notice additions and whether they appear to fit naturally with the original house. I notice whether the property has been carefully maintained or whether the need for maintenance has been accumulating for a while.
I’m not conducting a home inspection. That’s a different profession with a different purpose. An appraiser also shouldn’t pretend to diagnose structural, electrical, plumbing or other building problems that require expertise beyond the appraisal assignment. What I am doing is observing and documenting the readily observable property characteristics and conditions that may matter to its value and marketability.
Sometimes this means seeing something and simply asking another question, like: How old is the roof? Was this room added later? Is that garage conversion permitted? Is this building used as living space? Where does this driveway go? Every property has its own history, a story to share.
Then I Walk Inside
This is where homeowners sometimes expect me to be much more interested in their housekeeping than I am. I’m looking at the floor plan.
I’m thinking about the flow and function of the floor plan. How do you move through the house? Do the rooms make sense? Is there a natural relationship between the kitchen, dining and living areas? Are bedrooms reasonably private? Do you have to walk through one room to get to another? Has remodeling improved the utility of the home, or did solving one problem accidentally create another? And how do the current function and utility speak to the current buying public?
I’m looking at quality and condition too, and those aren’t the same thing. A modest home can be beautifully maintained. An expensive custom home can have deferred maintenance. A house can have a brand-new kitchen while the rest of it hasn’t been updated in thirty years. New finishes don’t automatically make the entire home new, just as dated finishes don’t necessarily mean a home is in poor condition.
That distinction matters in appraisal. Condition and quality are evaluated as characteristics of the property itself, and differences between a subject property and comparable sales can matter even when they fall within the same broader rating category. Mostly, though, I’m trying to understand the whole house rather than collect isolated facts about it.
I Notice the Things That Don’t Quite Fit
Some of the most interesting things in a home are the things that make me stop for a second. Maybe the exterior suggests a 1,500-square-foot house, but inside it feels considerably larger. Maybe there are three bedrooms in the county records, but I’m standing in four. Maybe a garage door is visible from the street, but when I walk inside there’s a bedroom and bathroom behind it. Maybe there’s an exterior door that doesn’t make sense until I realize part of the home has been configured as a separate living area.
Older homes are especially good at this. Families adapt houses to their lives. Porches get enclosed. Garages become rooms. Bedrooms become offices and then bedrooms again. Additions happen. Walls move. A second kitchen appears because Grandma moved in fifteen years ago.
Sometimes all of that is well documented. Sometimes the homeowner looks at me and says, “It’s been that way since we bought it.” Neither response is better than the other, and it doesn’t automatically mean there’s a problem. It means I need to understand what I’m looking at before deciding how it fits into the appraisal.
This is one reason the physical observation matters. Public records, photographs, plans and databases can tell us a tremendous amount about a property, but they don’t always tell the entire story. This is especially true here in the foothills of Northern California, where many homes predate building departments, modern building standards and permitting requirements. So, sometimes the house standing in front of you has the last word.
I Notice What Buyers Might Notice
This is where appraisal gets interesting because I’m not valuing houses in a vacuum. I’m trying to understand a market. A homeowner may love something about the property that another buyer considers unimportant. Something the homeowner barely notices anymore may be one of the first things a buyer sees.
There are many elements that go into value. Here are a few examples.
First, gold-plated faucets. Expensive? Yes. A typical market driver of value? No, not in the markets I appraise. This would generally be considered an overimprovement.
Second, a view. What makes a view “beautiful” varies by buyer. Often, long-range views are considered desirable, but these can come with ridge-type properties, steep properties where the land isn’t as usable, yet the market values the view rather than the utility of the land.
Or consider a built-in pool. A pool in South Lake Tahoe, a higher-altitude, cooler environment, most likely will not have the same market impact or value as a pool in Palm Springs, a hot desert environment.
Buyer reaction can be much subtler than that. Maybe the house has an unusually useful shop in an area where buyers specifically seek properties with space for equipment or hobbies. Maybe an unusual floor plan works wonderfully for this family but narrows the number of buyers who would find it equally useful.
The question isn’t whether something is good or bad according to me. The question is whether the market recognizes it and, if so, how.
That’s why comparable selection involves more than proximity. Professional appraisal guidance emphasizes selecting properties that are genuinely similar in characteristics buyers and sellers consider meaningful, including things such as location, size, condition, quality and site characteristics. Sometimes the best comparison is nearby. Sometimes a property farther away is a much better substitute.
That’s also why I spend so much time looking at the subject before I spend serious time choosing the final comparable sales. I need to know what I’m comparing.
I Notice What Isn’t There
Sometimes an observation is about absence. A house in a hot climate without central air conditioning. A rural property without the storage or parking buyers commonly expect. A large home with surprisingly little functional living space. A beautiful remodeled kitchen sitting beside bathrooms that haven’t been touched since 1978.
Or maybe the opposite is true. A house looks fairly ordinary from the street, but inside there is exceptional workmanship, thoughtful remodeling and a floor plan that functions considerably better than I expected. Those things don’t automatically translate into a predetermined number.
This is important to understand. An appraiser shouldn’t walk through a house mentally adding $20,000 because the kitchen is nice and subtracting $10,000 because the bathroom is dated. The market has to tell us whether buyers recognize a difference and what that difference appears to contribute. Sometimes they care a lot. Sometimes considerably less than the homeowner expects. That’s one of the reasons appraisal remains a judgment profession rather than simply a checklist.
What I Don’t Notice Might Surprise You
I don’t care that your teenager didn’t make the bed. The dog toys don’t matter. Neither does the pile of mail on the counter or the dishes you didn’t have time to put away before I arrived. Normal life doesn’t make a house worth less.
I do need to see enough of the property to understand what is there, and there are times when personal belongings can obscure something I need to observe. But I’m not grading housekeeping. This may seem obvious, but homeowners apologize often enough that it’s worth saying. You don’t need to make your home look like a real estate advertisement for an appraisal observation. You need to let me understand the house.
Eventually, All Those Observations Become Something Else
By the time I leave, I usually have a collection of things that don’t look particularly meaningful on their own. Measurements. Photographs. Notes. Questions. A sketch. Property characteristics. Things I want to verify later.
Then the field work and the market work begin to meet, and for me, the real work begins. The observation is a relatively brief part of the process. The analysis of the market and subject is where the bulk of my time is spent, and it’s typically significant.
That unusual shop I noticed becomes relevant when I’m studying what similar properties with shops have sold for. The steep acreage matters when I’m comparing it with ten acres that are mostly usable. The remodeled kitchen becomes part of a larger condition and quality analysis. The road I noticed on the way in may help explain why buyers reacted differently to another nearby property.
One observation leads to another question, and the questions eventually lead to market evidence. That’s the part of appraisal most people never see. The value isn’t determined during the walk through the house. I don’t leave the driveway knowing what the property is worth. The observation gives me something more fundamental. It tells me what questions I need to ask.
And after all these years, I think that may be one of the most important things an appraiser learns to notice. Not simply what’s there, rather, what deserves another question.
Christopher Pyle has more than 20 years of real estate appraisal experience in Northern California. He works alongside his mother, longtime appraiser Christine Pyle Banks, at AppraiserChris, their family appraisal practice serving the Sacramento region and Sierra Nevada foothills. His work focuses on helping homeowners, families and professionals better understand property value and the decisions that surround it.
