Honesty and Integrity: St. Charles/WestPlex Appraisal Services, LLC

Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. So it goes without question these days 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.

We have quite a few responsibilities as appraisers but our primary duty is to our clients. Typically, in residential practice, the lender places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers have rules and regulations they must follow, including keeping many matters private for their clients a homeowner, if you want to review an appraisal report, you should get it through your lender. Other responsibilities also include, numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, reaching and maintaining an adequate level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is standard operating procedure for us at St. Charles/WestPlex Appraisal Services, LLC.

There are some scenarios in which appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are listed in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary roll is limited to those parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.

Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for a minimum of five years - something else St. Charles/WestPlex Appraisal Services, LLC diligently adheres to.

St. Charles/WestPlex Appraisal Services, LLC holds itself to the industry standards and rules set in place for professional behavior. We refuse to accept anything less from ourselves. Doing orders on contingency fees is never an option. That is, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. We don't do assignments on percentage fees. That is probably the appraisal professions biggest no-no, because it would tend to make appraisers increase the value of homes or properties to increase their fee. We don't do that. Other improper practices may be defined by state law or professional organizations to which an appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also states 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," as well as other situations. We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be at ease knowing we are going above and beyond to objectively determine the home or property value.

With St. Charles/WestPlex Appraisal Services, LLC, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, professional service.