 Honesty and Integrity: Koepke AppraisalWe consider our job as a profession. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. So it goes without question in this day and age 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.
We have quite a few responsibilities as appraisers, but our primary duty is to our clients.
More often than not, for a normal 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 hired in order to maintain independence.
Appraisers have certain duties of privacy to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations that must be followed. As
a homeowner, if you would like a copy of the appraisal document, you normally should obtain it from your lender instead of the appraiser.
Appraisers can also have fiduciary obligations to third parties, such as homeowners, both buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are listed in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is limited to those parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the order.
Appraisers also have duties outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must store their work files for at least five years - at Koepke Appraisal you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule. When busy with an order, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Accepting orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. That is, we don't 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 inflating a value to achieve a higher paycheck is unethical! We just don't do it. Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") clearly defines 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 assured we are working hard to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value. With Koepke Appraisal, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, professional service. |
|||||||||
