 Honesty and Integrity: Pierce Appraisal Services, LLCAppraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can unquestionably be dubbed a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we are bound by an ethical code.
An appraiser's chief responsibility is to their client.
Typically, 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 hired in order to maintain independence.
Thereon, appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus many rules and regulations to which we must adhere. So, as
a homeowner, if you would like to review an appraisal report, you generally should request 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, both sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary role is restricted to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.
There are also ethical duties that have nothing to do with clients and others. For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for a minimum of five years - at Pierce Appraisal Services, LLC you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule. While busy with an assignment, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Working on assignments where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is never an option. In other words, we can't 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 what amounts to a higher paycheck is unethical! Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice also describes a violation in ethics 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" in addition to other situations We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value. With Pierce Appraisal Services, LLC, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, honest service. |
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