 MacDonald Residential Appraisal maintains the utmost professional ethicsAppraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever in the past. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can definitely be dubbed a profession as opposed to a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we are bound by an ethical code.
The appraiser's main responsibility is to their client.
More often than not, for a typical residential appraisal, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client.
Appraisers have certain duties of privacy to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations controlling with whom we share information. As
a homeowner, if you desire to review an appraisal report, you generally should request it through your lender instead of the appraiser.
Appraisers may also have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, both sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.
Appraisers also have duties outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must keep their work files for a minimum of five years - at MacDonald Residential Appraisal you can rest assured that we stick to that rule. We demand the highest ethical standards possible from ourselves. Doing assignments based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. That means 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 what amounts to a higher paycheck is unethical! Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice 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 follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are doing everything we can to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value. With MacDonald Residential Appraisal, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, professional service. |
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