Working through a deal where I'd carry maybe $180k on a $210k sale, and the parcel might actually comp closer to $240k. Trying to figure out if that gap between sale price and appraised value changes what a note buyer would pay for the paper down the road, or if they mostly care about the borrower's skin in the game.
Note buyers care about LTV against appraised value, not sale price. Your $180k note against a $240k comp is 75% LTV, that's cleaner paper than it looks. Sold a carried note in 2022, $140k balance, property had comped up since origination, got 88 cents instead of the 82 I expected. The equity cushion moved the buyer more than the borrower's payment history did.
In Phoenix right now note buyers are pricing at 82 to 88 cents on deals like yours.
Ran into this exact gap on a $155k carry I did in 2022 on a parcel in east Tennessee that comped around $190k. The note buyer I shopped it to six months later gave me credit for maybe half the spread. They ran their own BPO, came in lower than the appraisal, and effectively treated LTV like it was 78% instead of the 82% I'd calculated. So yes, the gap helps, but don't count on full dollar-for-dollar lift from it.
The bigger lever they were watching was payment history and whether the buyer had put any cash into the property since close. Two on-time payments and a gravel driveway the buyer poured meant more to the pricing conversation than the appraisal cushion did.
Honestly the appraised gap is less useful than you'd think, because the note buyer is going to pull their own BPO and price to that anyway, not your comp. What actually moves the needle on secondary pricing is the coupon rate on the note itself, so I'd push for 8.5 or 9% on that carry instead of whatever feels comfortable. That alone does more for your eventual exit price than a $30k cushion in appraised value.
