My boss had a 3-story, 5-bedroom, 5-bath house in primo Bellevue (high-priced area just outside of Seattle, close to Microsoft), and saw what houses were going for, and that he had the ONLY house of this size in the area, so he decided to pull up stakes and make the Big Move to the country. Buy land. Put a couple houses on it for his family. Get away from The Big City. The house went up for sale, sold for an astronomical price after a bidding war drove it way past asking, and got no inspections, no questions asked, and two months to live in the house free while they found a new home. They scoured Eastern Washington, found the perfect place on acreage with property rights to build another house on the site, put in the offer, was accepted, and packed up all their things. They move this week. Well... they WERE going to move this week. Turns out the bank won't give him the money without an appraisal. Appraisers business model has changed dramatically since the subprime mortgage debacle (not going to get into it right now), but now appraisals are done anonymously, and at the appraisers discretion. The appraiser said they'd be able to come out in 11 weeks. But for an additional $2500 they could come out this week. ahem. Assessing the value of a home is done according to some fairly strict rules. Like, comparable homes must be within a certain distance of the appraised home. Which is an issue when you move out to the country... my boss has ONE neighbor within the approved appraisal-comps radius. So the bank has An Issue With The Appraised Value, in that it doesn't compare with the one other house in the area... which is apparently a doublewide trailer, not a new 5-bedroom home built in the last 10 years. So the sale is on hold. My boss is - literally today - moving all of his stuff out of his perfectly fine home in Bellevue, and moving it into 6 storage spaces in Eastern Washington. His family is moving into a hotel in Eastern Washington. The contractors that were supposed to start this week on critical renovations to the new home have been put off, and won't be available for another 2-3 months. Real estate is fukt. My home is paid off and my wife and I are leaving this house feet-first.