Honesty and Integrity: Just Appraisals

Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can certainly be dubbed a profession as opposed to a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.

As appraisers our primary obligation is to their client. Typically, for a standard residential appraisal, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal. Appraisers have rules and regulations they must follow, including keeping many matters private for their clients a homeowner, if you would like to obtain a copy of the appraisal document, you should obtain it from your lender. Other responsibilities also include, numerical accuracy depending on the assignment's nature, reaching and keeping a respectable level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is standard operating procedure for us at Just Appraisals.

Appraisers will regularly be obligated to consider the interests of third parties, including homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Generally the third parties are specifically defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary roll is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the assignment.

Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for a minimum of five years - at Just Appraisals you can rest assured that we stick to that rule.

When creating reports, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Doing orders on contingency fees is not something we can consider That is, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. We can't do assignments on percentage fees. That is probably the appraisal professions biggest taboo, because it would invite appraisal fraud since increasing the estimate of the home would inflate the fee. We set ourselves to a higher standard. Other unprofessional practices may be established by state law or professional societies to which an appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also defines unethical behavior as accepting of an assignment that is contingent on "the reporting of a pre-determined result (e.g., opinion of value)," "a direction in assignment results that favors the cause of the client," "the amount of a value opinion," as well as other situations. We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Just Appraisals, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, professional service.