Appraiser was inside the house 18 minutes. Is that a red flag or just efficiency?

I had assumed the fee was mostly for the visit too. If most of it is desk hours then eighteen minutes tells you roughly nothing, which is oddly worse, because now I don't know what to look at instead.

I do walkthroughs on rentals all week and eighteen minutes for a three bedroom is normal if the person knows what they're doing. Room count, measurements, photos, mechanical ages, obvious deferred maintenance. You're not looking for what a home inspector looks for. You're looking for what makes this house different from the three sales you're going to compare it to, and in a plain house that list is short.

The thing I'd check isn't minutes, it's whether the sketch matches the house. Pull the report when you get it and compare the gross living area to what you measured yourself, and check whether the basement finish got counted above grade. That's where fast visits actually go wrong on my files, and it moves the number more than any adjustment they made.

Furnace age question tells me he was doing his job. Nobody asks that who's phoning it in.

trellis, does that hold if the house isn't plain though? meridian's house sounds standard, so fine. My worry would be a house with an addition done without permits, where eighteen minutes means the addition either gets counted or doesn't and nobody talks about it.

Reading this while planning a first purchase and what I'm taking from it is that the number I should be nervous about is which comps got picked, not how long the visit took. Is the comp selection something a buyer ever gets to see and question?

quill, yes, the report lists them with addresses and the adjustments, and you can ask your lender for a copy. Whether you can get anything changed is a separate matter. On my portfolio I've had one reconsideration of value succeed out of four attempts, and the one that worked was the one where I found a closed sale the appraiser had clearly missed rather than the ones where I argued about the adjustment amounts. Also worth knowing that roughly a dozen states don't make sale prices public, so what you can dig up yourself depends heavily on where the house is.

The part of your post I'd push on, meridian, is the comparison to an automated model. The model has no idea the furnace is original, no idea the back bedroom has a ceiling stain, no idea the layout puts the only bathroom off the kitchen. Eighteen minutes of a person who's looking is a completely different input, even if it looks like a photo shoot from the driveway.

So the question I was embarrassed to ask and will now ask anyway. If the desk work is where the value comes from, why does the visit exist at all on a normal house? Is it condition, or is it that the lender wants somebody to swear they were physically there?

compass, both, as far as I can tell. Condition and the certification that a person saw it. Which is also why waiver programs exist for the files where the lender decides it doesn't need either one, and that's an agency and lender decision, so the current rules there have to be confirmed with whoever is making the loan.

cobalt's square footage check is the one concrete action in this thread and I'd do it before anything else. Ten minutes with a tape and the sketch page.

Eighteen minutes would be a red flag on the parcels I look at, because half the value question is outside the house. Access, topography, where the septic sits, what the neighbor is doing with the adjoining forty. On a plain suburban three bedroom none of that applies and the walls are the whole story. So the answer to your title really depends on what kind of property it is, and yours sounds like the kind where fast is fine.