 JH Valuations upholds the highest professional ethicsWe think of our job as a profession. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever in the past. That's why it goes without question in this day and age that real estate appraisal can certainly 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 obligation is to their client.
Generally, 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 brought in to maintain independence.
It follows that appraisers are privy to a lot of information, and like an attorney, can only discuss many of these matters with their client. As
a homeowner, if you would like to review an appraisal report, you generally have to get it from your lender and not the appraiser.
Appraisers may also have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, both buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is limited to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the job.
Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must store their work files for a minimum of five years - at JH Valuations you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule. JH Valuations holds itself to the industry standards and guidelines set in place for professional behavior. We won't accept anything less from ourselves. Working on assignments based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. 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 inflating a value to achieve what amounts to a higher fee is unethical! This isn't how we operate. Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") 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 diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value. With JH Valuations, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, honest service. |
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