The facts that let them compare a home to recent sales nearby: gross living area measured to a national standard, condition and quality on the report's rated scales, the room count, the lot, the permitted work, and on FHA and VA loans anything that fails the program's safety standards.
An appraisal is not an inspection and it is not a scoring sheet. It is an opinion of market value built almost entirely by comparison: what did homes like this one, near this one, actually sell for, and how is this one different. Everything the appraiser writes down is either a fact needed to make that comparison or a condition the loan program requires.
The method is comparison, and it sets everything else
The appraiser pulls three to six closed sales, usually from the last three to six months and within a mile in a suburban market, then adjusts each one for the differences: fifty more square feet, a third bathroom, an extra garage bay, a lot twice the size, a pool, a busier street. The adjusted prices bracket the subject property and the appraiser reconciles them into one number. Active listings and pending sales appear as support for the direction of the market, not as evidence of value.
This is why the appraisal follows the comparable sales rather than leading them, and why a house that is unusual for its street is hard to appraise no matter how good it is. There is little to compare it to.
What gets measured and what gets rated
Gross living area is measured to the ANSI standard that Fannie Mae has required since 2022: finished space above grade, ceilings of at least seven feet over most of the room, and anything below grade reported as basement rather than living area. A converted garage, an enclosed patio or an addition counts only when it is finished, permitted and heated and cooled like the rest of the house.
Condition and quality are rated on the C1 to C6 and Q1 to Q6 scales, where C1 is new and C6 means deficiencies that affect safety or soundness, and Q1 is architect-designed custom work while Q6 is basic. The redesigned appraisal report that lenders moved to in late 2026 keeps both scales and adds separate interior and exterior ratings that are reconciled into the overall one, so a new roof and a dated kitchen are no longer averaged together silently.
The rest is a list of facts a buyer would price: bedroom and bathroom count, year built, garage spaces, lot size and shape, zoning, utilities, the age of the roof and the mechanical systems, views, and any easement or feature that separates the house from its neighbors.
What FHA and VA add on top
Government loan programs give the appraiser a second job: confirming the home meets minimum property requirements. Peeling paint on a home built before 1978, a missing handrail on a stairway, a roof with little remaining life, broken windows, exposed wiring, no working heat, a water heater without a proper relief valve discharge, or a failing septic or well all come back as repairs required before the loan can close. The appraiser then returns to confirm the work on a short completion report.
These are not opinions about quality. They are a list, and a house that fails an item fails it for every FHA buyer until it is fixed, which is worth knowing before an offer from an FHA buyer is compared with a conventional one.
The Las Vegas particulars
Four things come up here more than they do elsewhere. Pools are common enough in the valley that they add far less than they cost, and in a subdivision where most recent sales have one, the house without a pool is the one being adjusted. Casitas add value when they are permitted and on the county record; a casita nobody filed for is space the appraiser cannot count. Converted garages are the most frequent problem, because the work is often unpermitted and because losing the garage where every comparable sale has a two-car garage costs more than the square footage returns.
Leased solar is the fourth. Panels the owner holds outright can contribute value; panels on a lease or a power purchase agreement generally cannot, and the payment counts against the buyer's debt ratio, so the lease terms and any filing recorded against the property matter more to the loan than the panels do to the appraisal. The parcel record is where the permitted square footage, the pool and the year built are written down, and it is public.
Questions people ask
Does a messy house lower the appraisal?
No. Clutter, furniture, decor and paint color are not value, and appraisers see occupied houses all day. What does register in the photographs is damage, unfinished work and deferred maintenance, which are condition rather than housekeeping.
Do appraisers go in every room?
On a full interior appraisal, yes: every room is sketched or measured, photographed and noted, along with the garage, the attic access and any addition. Desktop and drive-by appraisals skip that, which is why lenders limit them to straightforward properties with good data.
How is an appraisal different from a home inspection?
The appraisal is for the lender and is about value, and the appraiser tests nothing. The inspection is for the buyer and is about condition, runs two to four hours, and reports defects that may have no effect at all on the appraised value.