 Honesty and Integrity: Wells Agency, Inc.Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. So it goes without question in this day and age that real estate appraisal can unquestionably be dubbed a profession as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we are bound by ethical considerations.
The 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 contracted in order to maintain independence.
Subsequently, appraisers have certain duties of privacy to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations controlling with whom we share information. As
a homeowner, if you want to review an appraisal report, you generally have to get it from your lender and not the appraiser.
There are some scenarios in which appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, including homeowners, both 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 knows, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.
Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must backup their work files for at least five years - at Wells Agency, Inc. you can rest assured that we abide by that rule. Wells Agency, Inc. holds itself to the industry standards and rules set in place for ethics. We refuse to accept anything less from ourselves. Working on orders based on contingency fees is never an option. That means we can't agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. It should be apparent to anyone that inflating a value to achieve what amounts to a bigger paycheck is unethical! We set ourselves to a higher standard. Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice clearly states 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 doing everything we can to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value. With Wells Agency, Inc., you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, professional service. |
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