![]() Lone Star Appraisals upholds the utmost professional ethicsTypically, appraising is a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever before. So it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can definitely be dubbed a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we are bound by an ethical code.
The appraiser's primary obligation is to their client.
Typically, for a regular residential appraisal, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client.
Subsequently, appraisers are typically restricted to only disclosing information to their clients, so as
a homeowner, if you desire a copy of the appraisal document, you generally have to obtain it from your lender instead of the appraiser.
Appraisers may regularly have fiduciary obligations 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 knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.
Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must backup their work files for a minimum of five years - at Lone Star Appraisals you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule. When busy with an assignment, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Accepting assignments where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. In other words, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. Anyone should be able to see that inflating a value to achieve essentially a bigger paycheck is unethical! This isn't how we operate. Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice explicitly 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" as well as other situations. We follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are doing everything we can to get you an accurate home or property value. With Lone Star Appraisals, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, honest service. |