I'm a first time home buyer, here is my situation:

-Early August; find a house I like; it feels smaller than listed dimensions; my agent measures and finds a >20% discrepancy; I make a low ball offer
-Sellers reject offer
-Sellers fire their agent
-Sellers hire new agent who orders appraisal
-Appraisal is conducted around August 10. Appraisal comes in at X
-Sept. 11 make a new offer to sellers for slightly less than X; they accept
-Sept. 17 my bank orders an appraisal for the mortgage.

I get the appraisal back today and see that it has been conducted by the exact same appraiser who conducted the initial appraisal and comes back for the same value X.

I'm more or less fine with all of this -- I understand that appraisals are getting a lot more scrutiny due to the meltdown so I didn't even bother asking if my lender would accept the original appraisal. I did not mind paying the fee. But, now I'm a little annoyed that I'm still being charged a full $350 fee, when I imagine that the appraiser didn't have to do much other than update the date on the initial appraisal.

I understand that I did not pay for the original appraisal, and that it was a new order, by a new client. Do I have any justification in asking for a reduced fee, or is this generally how these things work?

Perhaps you should have been asking these type of questions before the second appraisal was ordered.

I am surprised that after 37 days they needed a new appraisal. I guess it's coincidence that the same guy did it. #1 was ordered by the seller's agent on behalf of the seller, #2 by the lender, right?

We just went through this last Monday. One appraisal came back $22,000 less than the other. I spoke with the woman who did the low ball appraisal and she told me it was based on 4 homes that had sold recemntly and 2 that were "pending sale". She gave me the addresses of homes that had sold and she compared our home (5 bedrooms, 2 baths and 2800 sq ft) to homes that had 2 bedrooms and 1 bath and 1200 sq ft and had sold for about the price of what she appraised our home at, even though our home is in a better neighborhood. She lives 30 miles away in a different city and was rather quite rude to me on the phone.

The higher appraisal came from a company in our own town and they actually compared our homw to others with similar square footage and # of bedrooms and # of bathrooms. Go figure. I won't be recommending the frist appraiser to anyone I know. She is an idiot!