![]() Meade & Associates maintains the utmost professional ethicsAppraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. 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 must follow strict ethical considerations.
An appraiser's chief responsibility is to their client.
Typically, for a standard residential appraisal, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal, and often the appraisal is ordered by a third party the lender has retained to maintain independence.
Consequently, appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus many rules and regulations to which we must adhere. As
a homeowner, if you desire to review an appraisal report, you generally have to request it from your lender and not the appraiser.
Appraisers will frequently need to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in scope of 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 things in the framework of the order.
There are also ethical duties that have nothing to do with clients and others. For example, appraisers must backup their work files for at least five years - something else Meade & Associates takes very seriously. We meet or exceed the industry standards and guidelines set in place for ethics. We can't accept anything less from ourselves. Working on assignments where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is never an option. In other words, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. It should be obvious that fabricating a home's value to achieve a bigger paycheck is unethical! We set ourselves to a higher standard. Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") 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 be confident we are doing everything we can to get you an accurate home or property value. When you order an appraisal from Meade & Associates, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you expect along with the high ethical standards we're known for. |