 Craig Gehm Appraisals upholds the highest professional ethicsWe consider our business as a profession. 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 definitely be called a profession as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we must follow strict ethical considerations.
We have a lot of responsibilities as appraisers, but our chief duty is to our clients.
Generally, for a normal residential appraisal, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client.
Thereon, appraisers have certain duties of privacy to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations that must be followed. As
a homeowner, if you would like to review an appraisal report, you generally should request it via your lender.
Appraisers will frequently be obligated to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary role is only to those parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.
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 at least five years - something else Craig Gehm Appraisals takes very seriously. When busy with an assignment, 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 means we don't agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. Anyone should be able to see that fabricating a property's value to achieve what amounts to a bigger fee is unethical! Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice clearly describes a violation in ethics 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" in addition to other situations We follow these rules to the letter which means you can be at ease knowing we are doing everything we can to objectively determine the home or property value. With Craig Gehm Appraisals, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, professional service. |
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