Honesty and Integrity: Sonner Appraisals

Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever in the past. So it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can certainly be called a profession as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we must follow strict ethical considerations.

For an appraiser the chief obligation is to their client. Most of the time, for a standard residential appraisal, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal. Appraisers have rules and regulations they must follow, including confidentiality for their clients a homeowner, if you want to obtain a copy of an appraisal report, you generally have to request it through your lender. Other responsibilities also include, numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, attaining and keeping a particular 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 Sonner Appraisals.

Appraisers will sometimes need to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty 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.

There are also ethical duties that have nothing to do with clients and others. For example, appraisers must store their work files for a minimum of five years - at Sonner Appraisals you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

When creating reports, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Doing orders on contingency fees is not something we can consider That is, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. We don't do assignments on percentage fees. That is perhaps the appraisal professions biggest no-no, because it would tend to make appraisers inflate the value of homes or properties to increase their paycheck. We don't do that. Other improper practices may be defined by state law or professional organizations that the 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 diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are doing everything we can to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Sonner Appraisals, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, honest service.