The Appraisal Firm maintains the highest professional ethics

We have a great deal of responsibilities as appraisers, but our main duty is to our clients. Normally, in residential practice, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Subsequently, appraisers are privy to a lot of information, and like an attorney, can only discuss many of these matters with their client. As a homeowner, if you want to obtain a copy of the appraisal document, you normally have to request it from your lender instead of the appraiser.

Other obligations include accurate calculations appropriate to the scope of the assignment, reaching and keeping an appropriate level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics is what we do every day at The Appraisal Firm.

There are some scenarios in which appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, both sellers and buyers, or others. Typically the third parties are specifically defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is limited to those third parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the job.

	The Appraisal Firm has worked hard for its reputation for performing competent and ethically superior appraisals. Contact us today to learn more.

Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must store their work files for at least five years - something else The Appraisal Firm diligently adheres to.

While busy with an assignment, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Working on orders based on contingency fees is never an option. In other words, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. It should be obvious that inflating a value to achieve what amounts to a bigger fee is unethical! We just don't do it.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") explicitly describes 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", or "the amount of a value opinion" as well as other situations. We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are going above and beyond to get you an accurate home or property value.

As soon as you order an appraisal from The Appraisal Firm, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you expect along with the high ethical standards we're known for.