Honesty and Integrity: Dennis Appraisals

An appraiser's primary responsibility 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 hired in order to maintain independence. Subsequently, appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations to which we must adhere. So, as a homeowner, if you would like to obtain a copy of an appraisal report, you generally have to get it from your lender.

Other obligations include accurate sums appropriate to the nature of the assignment, attaining and keeping an appropriate level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is what we do every day at Dennis Appraisals.

Appraisers will frequently need to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Normally the third parties are explicitly defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary role is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the order.

	Dennis Appraisals has an established reputation for producing appraisals with the highest of ethics. Contact us today to learn more.

There are also ethical rules that have nothing to do with whom we share information. For example, appraisers must store their work files for a minimum of five years - something else Dennis Appraisals takes very seriously.

Dennis Appraisals holds itself to the industry standards and guidelines set in place for professional behavior. We won't accept anything less from ourselves. Accepting assignments where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is never an option. That is, we can't agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. There's an obvious conflict of interest if an appraiser can report an unsubstantiated value with the reward of getting paid more money! This isn't how we operate.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") explicitly states 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" as well as other situations. We diligently 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.

With Dennis Appraisals, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, professional service.