Elite Appraisal Group provides honest and ethical appraisals for Placer County

Honesty and Integrity: Elite Appraisal Group

Typically, appraising is a long term career. 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 certainly be dubbed a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we have a strict ethical code.

An appraiser's primary obligation is to their client. Most of the time, for a normal residential appraisal, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal, and often the appraisal is ordered by a third party the lender has retained to maintain independence. It follows that appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations that must be followed. So, as a homeowner, if you would like to review the appraisal document, you normally should obtain it through your lender and not the appraiser.

Other obligations include numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, acquiring and maintaining a respectable level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics is just normal course of business for us at Elite Appraisal Group.

Appraisers may also have fiduciary obligations to third parties, such as homeowners, both buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is limited to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.


	Elite Appraisal Group has an established reputation for producing competent and ethically superior appraisals. To learn more, contact us.

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 Elite Appraisal Group you can rest assured that we stick to that rule.

When creating reports, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Accepting assignments based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. That is, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. There's an obvious conflict of interest if an appraiser can report an unsubstantiated value with the reward of getting paid more money! We set ourselves to a higher standard.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice also describes 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 diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are working hard to get you an accurate home or property value.

With Elite Appraisal Group, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, honest service.