Holmes Appraisal Service maintains the highest professional ethics

Appraising is generally a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. That's why it goes without question these days 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 ethical considerations.

As appraisers our primary responsibility is to their client. Normally, in residential practice, the lender places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers have rules and regulations they must follow, including confidentiality for their clients a homeowner, if you would like to obtain a copy of the appraisal document, you normally have to obtain it from your lender. Other responsibilities also include, numerical accuracy depending on the assignment's nature, acquiring and keeping a respectable level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics is is what we do everyday at Holmes Appraisal Service.

Appraisers will frequently need to consider the interests of 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 roll is only to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the job.

There are also ethical duties that have nothing to do with clients and others. For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for at least five years - at Holmes Appraisal Service you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

We meet or beat the industry standards and mandates set in place for ethics. We can't accept anything less from ourselves. Doing orders on contingency fees is never an option. That is, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. We don't do assignments on percentage fees. That is perhaps the appraisal industries biggest taboo, because it would invite fraudulent practices since increasing the value of the home would inflate the their paycheck. We don't do that. Other unethical practices may be defined by state law or professional organizations to which an appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also 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," "the amount of a value opinion," in addition to other situations We follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are doing everything we can to objectively determine the home or property value.

With Holmes Appraisal Service, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, honest service.