 Honesty and Integrity: US Appraisal Service of Colorado, LLCAppraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. That's why it goes without question in this day and age that real estate appraisal can certainly be considered a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.
An appraiser's primary responsibility is to their client.
Generally, in residential practice, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal, and often the appraisal is ordered by a third party the lender has contracted in order to maintain independence.
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 would like a copy of an appraisal report, you normally have to get it from your lender and not the appraiser.
There are some scenarios in which appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is limited to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the order.
Appraisers also have duties outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for at least five years - something else US Appraisal Service of Colorado, LLC diligently adheres to. When creating reports, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Doing assignments where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. That is, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. Anyone should be able to see that inflating a value to achieve essentially a bigger fee is unethical! We set ourselves to a higher standard. Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") explicitly states unethical behavior as the acceptance 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 be confident we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value. As soon as you request an appraisal from US Appraisal Service of Colorado, LLC, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you deserve along with the high ethical standards we're known for. |
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