Is a good appraisal an oxymoron
Maybe it depends on how you define good as Bill Clinton might have famously said. 
HVCC is all the news in real estate today as deals are getting killed by low appraisals. It's not that the appraisals are bad because they're coming in low, it's that the appraisers working for the Appraisal Management Companies are cranking out appraisals in areas that they aren't familiar with and in some cases picking comparables that aren't comparable at all.
In one of the weirdest real estate transactions I've ever been involved in, a few months ago my client was asked to accept a similar but better property instead of the one they had originally selected. The short story, (so we can get back to appraisals) was that they had made an offer on a condo being used by the builder during a builder close out and then the builder decided he didn't want to give up his office so he bought a slightly better (and more expensive) unit that was available and turned around and sold it to my clients for the same price they originally agreed on.
And to the surprise of my client, even though everyone knew that they were getting more for the same price, the substitute unit actually appraised for a little less than the original.
So while we can all agree that an appraisal is only an opinion of value, how is that value being determined.
Jonathan Miller at Matrix talks about comparable sales in a NY Times cover story on the subject.
And without a stockpile of comparable sales for reference, Mr. Miller said, “you have to really know the local market, so you can go beyond the raw sales data and use all the subjective factors you can to really tell the story about a property.” (emphasis added)
Ines Hegedus-Garcia at Miamism talks about a deal that was killed by an appraiser with Minnesota license tags doing an appraisal in Miami.
This appraiser used properties that were far from being comparables, from areas that made no sense and property types that were beyond absurd. Although we requested an appraisal review, this process was out of our control and we could not salvage the deal. One week later the listing agent and owner accepted a deal that was 10% lower than our client’s offer, went through the same process, but in that case, the appraisal came in higher than our original offer. So how can 2 appraisers come up with a value of a property with over a 20% disparity? Talk about a loss loss situation for both our buyer and the seller – the only one that came out benefiting from the disparity was the final buyer who got a great deal because of a major flaw in the financing sector.
Bottom line, there is no doubt that appraisals were probably too high during the real estate boom and may be too low in today's more conservative lending environment but I think both Charleston home buyers and Charleston home sellers just need a competent appraisal from someone familiar with the local Charleston real estate market.