But residential appraisers employ very few of the tools available from analytical palette, and pretty much assume the rest of the world had gone mad, and not them.per sq ft is the most important variable. That is how people assess each and every unit they walk into.
Right from the first response, someone told you:
“Dollar per square foot is not a valid measure of value. “
PSF is a valid unit of measure. It’s just that per-unit prices behave differently than whole prices. Sometimes when this discussion pops up, I post a little two-page report that uses both price and price/sf to appraise the same set of sales and they produce the same number (within about one percent).
I think if you hadn’t referred to judging value on PSF, you wouldn’t have had so many hostile responses. I thought you made a good case that the first appraisal didn’t evaluate construction quality well, and thus came in too low by using the wrong comps.