What really got me is when I met a guy who was trying to refinance a $110K mortgage on a house that is easily worth over a million....and they were giving him a hard time about the appraisal.
Not to cause waves here, but the problem we are having in our area is that the market is improving and the realtors are listing and selling at higher offers than they market can support. Appraisers are still required to utilize sales with the past 6 months (as a general rule - some lenders will allow 12 months), and those older sales are still showing decreased prices. The market needs to keep recovering for the older sales to drop off to support higher appraised values.
The lenders who will let appraisers go back for more than six months are just compounding the whole mess - HUD is one of them.
Now comes the problem of high FICO scores being required, which severely limits the amount of sales available.