Honesty and Integrity: First Advantage Appraisal Service

We have many responsibilities as appraisers, but first and foremost we answer to our clients. Most of the time, for a regular residential appraisal, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Consequently, appraisers are typically restricted to only disclosing their findings to their clients, so as a homeowner, if you desire to review an appraisal report, you generally have to get it from your lender instead of the appraiser.

Other obligations include accurate figures appropriate to the nature of the report, acquiring and keeping a respectable level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Here at First Advantage Appraisal Service, we take these ethical responsibilities very seriously.

Appraisers will regularly be obligated to consider the interests of third parties, including homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Typically the third parties are explicitly defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary role is only to those parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.

	First Advantage Appraisal Service has worked hard for its reputation for producing appraisals with the highest of ethics. To learn more, contact us.

Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must store their work files for at least five years - at First Advantage Appraisal Service you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule.

We meet or exceed the industry standards and mandates set in place for ethics. We refuse to accept anything less from ourselves. Doing assignments where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion 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. Anyone should be able to see that inflating a value to achieve essentially a higher fee is unethical! We set ourselves to a higher standard.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice also defines unethical behavior 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 rest easy knowing we are going above and beyond to objectively determine the home or property value.

As soon as you request an appraisal from First Advantage Appraisal Service, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you deserve along with the high ethical standards we're known for.