Honesty and Integrity: Foster Appraisal Services, LLCAppraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. 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 considered a profession as opposed to a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we are bound by an ethical code.
An appraiser's chief responsibility is to their client.
Typically, 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 retained 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 normally should obtain it through your lender instead of the appraiser.
Appraisers can also have fiduciary obligations to third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out 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 assignment.
There are also ethical standards that have nothing to do with whom we share information. For example, appraisers must backup their work files for at least five years - at Foster Appraisal Services, LLC you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule. We demand the highest ethical standards possible from ourselves. Accepting orders based on contingency fees is never an option. That means we are not able to 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 home's value to achieve a higher fee is unethical! We just don't do it. Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice also 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 diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are going above and beyond to objectively determine the home or property value. With Foster Appraisal Services, LLC, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, professional service. |