An appraisal waiver is an offer from Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac, delivered through your lender’s automated underwriting, to accept your contract price as the value of the house without sending an appraiser. It saves a fee and roughly two weeks, and it means no independent party puts a current number on what you agreed to pay. Accept it when the house is ordinary for its street and you still run a full inspection. Pay for the appraisal when the property is unusual, when comparable sales are thin, or when you want a third-party number behind a price renegotiation.
Three levels of review sit behind that offer
One phrase covers three different things, and knowing which you were offered tells you who will actually look at the house.
Fannie Mae calls the first value acceptance. Under Selling Guide topic B4-1.4-10, updated June 3, 2026, Desktop Underwriter offers it on certain loan casefiles and no appraisal is required. Nobody visits. The second is value acceptance plus property data, topic B4-1.4-11, updated December 10, 2025. Someone does visit: a trained and vetted property data collector performs a visual observation of the interior and exterior, producing photos and a floor plan. That collector is not an appraiser and gives no opinion of value, but must report any safety, soundness or structural integrity issues. Where the collection shows something failing, the lender may need a professional report on the well, septic, foundation, roof, electrical or mold.
Freddie Mac runs the same two tracks under Guide Chapter 5602 as ACE and ACE plus PDR, both effective November 9, 2026, and is blunt about what its acceptance is worth. Section 5602.3(j) says a lender accepting an ACE offer must not represent that Freddie Mac performed a property review or obtained a valuation. The third level is the ordinary appraisal, where a licensed appraiser inspects the house and states an opinion of value.
The offer usually rests on an earlier appraisal of your house
Fannie Mae states that for value acceptance to be considered, generally a prior appraisal must be found for the subject property in its Collateral Underwriter data, and that Desktop Underwriter uses that prior appraisal to judge eligibility. Where Collateral Underwriter issued an overvaluation flag on it, or it could not be scored, no waiver is offered.
So a house that sold or refinanced in recent years is the kind that draws a waiver, because an appraisal of it already exists, and the number being accepted is still your contract price checked against a file that predates your contract. On a Freddie Mac ACE purchase the Guide says plainly that Freddie Mac accepts the purchase price as the value.
Your down payment can settle this before you do
Freddie Mac publishes hard loan-to-value ceilings for ACE. A purchase of a primary residence or second home tops out at 90 percent, so the no-visit waiver is unavailable to most low down payment buyers. ACE plus PDR, where a data collector does visit, allows the standard program maximums in Guide Sections 4203.1(b)(ii) and (iii).
| Down payment on $425,000 | Loan amount | LTV | Inside the 90% ACE ceiling |
|---|---|---|---|
| $21,250 (5%) | $403,750 | 95% | No |
| $42,500 (10%) | $382,500 | 90% | Yes, at the limit |
| $85,000 (20%) | $340,000 | 80% | Yes |
Fannie Mae lists disqualifying transactions instead of publishing an LTV table, among them two to four unit properties, co-op units and manufactured homes, proposed construction, gifts of equity and manually underwritten loans. One-unit condominiums are eligible. Freddie Mac also excludes non-arm’s length transactions and any purchase where the property seller is a lender or a government entity, which takes most foreclosure and REO purchases off the table.
Offers expire. Fannie Mae requires its offer be no more than four months old on the note date; Freddie Mac’s is valid for 120 days, and changing the price, loan amount, property type or occupancy invalidates it.
What gets disclosed can pull the offer back
Freddie Mac bars a lender from accepting an ACE offer where it is aware, from the sales contract, the property disclosure statement, an inspection or the borrower, of an adverse physical property deficiency warranting a full report. On purchases the lender must review the contract and any disclosure statement for exactly that. The Guide’s examples include a contaminated site or hazardous substance affecting the property or neighborhood, and a deficiency consistent with a C5 or C6 condition rating, naming active roof leaks and a damaged or failing foundation. Fannie Mae arrives from the other direction: a lender may not exercise a waiver where it believes an appraisal is warranted based on additional information about the property or on subsequent events.
So your inspection report and the seller’s Florida disclosure can cost you the waiver, and that is the system behaving correctly. Treat a waiver as a financing convenience that survives while the file stays quiet, never as evidence about condition.
After a declared disaster, the rule changes
This part is specific to buying in Florida. Fannie Mae’s topic B2-3-05, updated September 3, 2025, states that Desktop Underwriter is periodically updated with the ZIP codes inside FEMA-declared disaster areas eligible for Individual Assistance, and that new loan casefiles in those ZIP codes are excluded from a new waiver offer. Where an offer already exists, the lender may still exercise it if condition requirements are met: insured damage not affecting safety, soundness or structural integrity can proceed with documented repair estimates and funds set aside, while uninsured or structural damage must be repaired first. Freddie Mac instead allows ACE in a disaster area if the lender can warrant that value and marketability have not been adversely impacted. Which investor your lender sells to decides what a storm does to your waiver, so ask in writing.
Ask for the written valuation anyway
Regulation B, at 12 CFR 1002.14, requires a creditor to give you a copy of all appraisals and other written valuations developed in connection with an application secured by a first lien on a dwelling, promptly upon completion or three business days before closing, whichever is earlier. The creditor must notify you of that right within three business days of your application and may not charge you for the copy.
The definition is what makes this useful. A valuation is any estimate of a dwelling’s value developed in connection with an application, and the official interpretation gives as examples a report approved by a government-sponsored enterprise describing the value estimate developed under its proprietary methodology, and a report generated by an automated valuation model. Those are the waiver cases. One honest limit: the same interpretation says property inspection reports that do not estimate value are not valuations, so a data collection report sits outside that right. Ask for it as a courtesy.
Your loan type may answer the question for you
Waivers are a conventional feature. On an FHA loan, 24 CFR 203.5(e)(1) requires the mortgagee to have the property appraised using an appraiser from the FHA Appraiser Roster. On a VA loan, 38 CFR 36.4339 conditions the guaranty on the loan not exceeding the reasonable value determined by the Secretary, and requires the veteran to certify payment in cash of any gap between purchase price and that value. A government-backed file gets a valuation either way.
Before you accept
- Ask which offer you have, no visit or a property data collection. That changes who sees the house.
- Check the expiration against your closing date. Four months and 120 days both run from origination.
- Request the written valuation under Regulation B, and the data collection report if one exists.
- Keep the inspection, and remember insurance underwriting runs on its own documents, including the four-point inspection on older homes.
- Price the alternative. Freddie Mac puts the skipped fee at roughly $600 and says ACE loans closed about 14 days faster than appraised purchases as of the second quarter of 2025.
The room to ask for a price adjustment comes from the gap between where a home is positioned and where comparable homes actually trade, and a low appraisal is the document that converts that gap into leverage. Waive it and the gap still exists with nothing third-party to point at. When a number does come in under contract price, the remedies run through your contract, covered in what to do when the appraisal comes in low.
Frequently asked questions
Does a waiver mean I can skip the home inspection?
No. An appraisal states an opinion of value for the lender. Where a waiver applies, Freddie Mac prohibits a lender from representing that Freddie Mac performed a property review or obtained a valuation at all, and even a property data collection is a visual observation by someone who is not an appraiser and gives no opinion of value. Your inspection stays the only step commissioned by you and aimed at condition.
If the waiver accepts my contract price, can I still overpay?
Yes. On a Freddie Mac ACE purchase the Guide accepts the purchase price as the value, and on a Fannie Mae waiver Fannie Mae accepts the value estimate the lender submitted. In neither case has a current independent opinion of value been formed on your house. What you gain is that the lender and the investor stop treating value as a reason to repurchase the loan, which protects them rather than you.
Can I order an appraisal anyway if my lender offers a waiver?
You can pay for one, and it ends the waiver. Fannie Mae states that a lender may not exercise a value acceptance offer if an appraisal is obtained for the transaction, and Freddie Mac lists mortgages for which an appraisal or property data report has been obtained as ineligible for ACE. There is no version where the appraisal comes in, you dislike the number, and the waiver quietly returns. Decide before the order goes out.
Where to go from here
Before contingencies come off, settle which valuation path your lender is on and what recent comparable sales say about your contract price independent of that path. The first is a question for your loan officer. The second decides whether a waiver is a convenience or a blind spot.
When you want that run on a specific address, book a strategy session at mvphomegroup.com/nelsoncruz. We start with the comparable sales and the property’s condition record, because those two facts decide what the offer should say long before an underwriting engine does.
Nelson Cruz, P.A.
Founder & CEO
MVP Home Group, Real Broker LLC
Nelson brings nearly two decades in law enforcement to his work in real estate. View Nelson’s profile or contact our team at 407-901-9939 or [email protected].
Featured image: AI-generated editorial illustration of a laser distance measuring tool, a metal clipboard holding a pencil floor-plan sketch, a steel tape measure and an upright measuring wheel resting on a low garden wall in front of a single-story stucco house in late-morning light. No people and no readable text. Not a particular property or neighborhood.