Honesty and Integrity: Schaeffer Appraisal Services

We have a lot of responsibilities as appraisers, but our primary duty is to our clients. Typically, in residential practice, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers are privy to a lot of data, and like an attorney, can only discuss many of these matters with their client. As a homeowner, if you want to obtain a copy of the appraisal document, you generally should request it through your lender and not the appraiser.

Other obligations include numerical accuracy depending on the assignment parameters, acquiring and keeping an adequate level of competency and education, and naturally, the appraiser must bear a professional demeanor. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is just normal course of business for us at Schaeffer Appraisal Services.

There are some scenarios in which appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Typically the third parties are explicitly defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary role is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the order.

	Schaeffer Appraisal Services has an established track record for completing 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 Schaeffer Appraisal Services you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

We only perform to the highest ethical standards possible. Accepting orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is never an option. That means we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. There's a definite conflict of interest if an appraiser can report a larger value and then get paid more money! This isn't how we operate.

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 rest easy knowing we are doing everything we can to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Schaeffer Appraisal Services, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, honest service.