Our broker told me I was crazy for paying for an appraisal twice, once prior to our offer and second when we finance, but I felt more comfortable doing it this way..
This red flag jumped out at me, and made it difficult to concentrate on your question. Your best line of defense is conservative brokerage.
Everyone knows that the reliability of your lender originated appraisal is only as credible as the lenders management of the appraisers panels. Usually this means credibility for big box lending is absolutely in the toilet. Appraisers who kill deals over roofing issues and come in short on appraised value typically get served and replaced after any single instance of disagreement with all too many lenders out there. Appraisal independence is a factor in your question, specifically lack there of. Your privately ordered appraisal is probably the only one you should count on. Your broker sounds like one of these we only need to hear from the appraiser once type of guys. They hate dealing with appraisers because price and value don't always jive, but the price guys pretend to have an expectation that they always should. What do they care about value? It's not their investment, they are mainly interested in profit through closing. That's why the appraiser is a unique participator and gets paid for the opinion rendered, not the ability to close deals. But like I stated; in a perfect world, which it is not.
Per value: What is the difference in market value for a home with this improvement? All else being equal, this should equate to a straight up reduction in value that is very similar to actual cost to cure price. Some investment incentive is probably present where owners who do this improvement make it easy on buyers who don't have to put the work in, so there could be a minor uptick in home value vs actual roof repair cost.
Sadly, in may neighborhoods, the specifics of some items are overlooked, and even run down examples compete with already improved properties. This is sometimes more common in ritzy areas. Why? Waterfront and scarce ability to replace benefits and exclusive neighborhood appeal. Although it's a major issue, the focus on the roof may distract you from the lot and the view. Decide for yourself where your priorities are, and if the home with the old roof has the million dollar view of that million dollar mansion, I guess you just factor the roof cost in above the market price. But if it's a standard lot, you'd be best off surfing other examples, even over time, to really see if the value is there or not. A roof job can mean more than just a roof. There is all sorts of underlayer work and moisture and insulation work, etc, etc. $25k sounds robust and credible, but then again, if there is any rot, you might as well start tacking on thousands more.
Examples of how roof condition factors in to appraisal: Depends on the comparison sales examples available.
In a perfect world six sales in the past year of six identical houses, three with old roofs, three with new roofs. Differences between the two sets would typically be the cost of roof plus minor upcharge since the sellers coordinated those repairs and the buyers paid for that service by a higher sales price which included the costs of roof plus costs of time and energy since the seller fixed it up nice before hand.
Value in use, value in market, value in remaining effective life of materials. Most importantly; personal value based on your future use and defined term holding of the unit. If you're buying a retirement home with a view, you almost don't even care about the roof and just factor in the cost or pay the price for fixed roof if that's the roof on the lot you want. If it's a flip, you probably want the old roof so you can fix and flip to profit victory. Anyways, that's for reading, Cedar roof is so silly. They went with that material because it had interesting thermal mass heat retention abilities, but unless the owners kept it sealed up right, it eventually just became roof tinder with much less insulation and protective ability.
