Real estate appraisal is called a profession rather than a trade, and as with any profession we have a strict ethical code.

We have a great deal of responsibilities as appraisers, but our main duty is to our clients. Normally, in residential practice, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. 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. 

Other obligations include numerical accuracy depending on the assignment's nature, attaining and maintaining an adequate level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is what we do every day at K.W. APPRAISALS, LLC.

Appraisers will sometimes be obligated to consider the interests of third parties, including homeowners, both buyers and sellers, or others. Normally the third parties are explicitly defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the assignment.

K.W. APPRAISALS, LLC has worked hard for its reputation for producing appraisals with the highest of ethics. 

Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must store their work files for at least five years - at K.W. APPRAISALS, LLC you can rest assured that we stick to that rule.
 

We require the highest professional integrity possible from ourselves. Working on orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. In other words, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. There's certainly a conflict of interest if an appraiser can report a larger value with the reward of getting paid more money!

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") explicitly defines unethical behavior 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 follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With K.W. APPRAISALS, LLC, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, honest service.