Yes, appraisal waivers on conventional loans are alive and well. We see them fairly regularly, on purchases and refinances alike, including some higher loan-to-value files. The mechanism: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have required appraisals to be delivered in a standardized digital (XML) format since 2011, with electronic submission through their portal mandatory by early 2012. That gives their automated systems well over a decade of standardized appraisal data, which those systems use to decide, file by file, whether they will accept a stated value without ordering a new full appraisal. Whether you get a waiver depends on the property, the loan-to-value, the strength of that data, and the loan scenario, so no file is ever guaranteed one. A middle option has also become common: the property data report. For a couple hundred dollars, a trained (though unlicensed) inspector photographs and measures the home, feeding data back into the system rather than relying on one appraiser's opinion of value. When a data-driven waiver or a property data report is available and the numbers support it, we generally will not over-index on a single appraiser's judgment of value. Your loan officer can run the automated findings and tell you what came back for your specific scenario, since the decision happens file by file rather than by blanket policy.