Honesty and Integrity: BK Appraisals LLC

Appraising is typically a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. So it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can definitely be considered a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.

An appraiser's chief obligation is to their client. Typically, in residential practice, the lender places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers have certain duties of privacy to their clients, and as a homeowner, if you would like to review an appraisal report, you generally have to obtain it from your lender. Other obligations also include, numerical accuracy depending on the assignment parameters, acquiring and sustaining an adequate 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 BK Appraisals LLC.

Appraisers may sometimes have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Typically the third parties are clearly defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary roll is limited to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.

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

BK Appraisals LLC holds itself to the industry standards and rules set in place for ethics. We won't accept anything less from ourselves. We don't do assignments on contingency fees. That is, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. We can't do assignments on percentage fees. That is perhaps the appraisal industries most important rule, because it would tend to make appraisers up the value of homes or properties to increase their fee. We don't do that. Other unethical practices may be established by state law or professional societies 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 follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are doing everything we can to objectively determine the home or property value.

With BK Appraisals LLC, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, professional service.