Appraiser Ethics

Honesty and Integrity: M.G. Cangelose and Associates

 By and large, appraising is a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever in the past. So it goes without question in this day and age that real estate appraisal can definitely be considered a profession as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we must follow strict ethical considerations.

An appraiser's main responsibility is to their client. Typically, in residential practice, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Subsequently, appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus many rules and regulations controlling with whom we share information. As a homeowner, if you want to obtain a copy of an appraisal report, you generally have to get it through your lender and not the appraiser.

Other responsibilities include accurate sums appropriate to the nature of the report, acquiring and sustaining an appropriate 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 M.G. Cangelose and Associates.

Appraisers will regularly be obligated to consider the interests of third parties, including homeowners, both sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is only to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the order.

	M.G. Cangelose and Associates has an established reputation for completing appraisals with the highest of ethics. Contact us today to learn more.

Appraisers also have duties outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for a minimum of five years - at M.G. Cangelose and Associates you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule.

We demand the highest professional integrity possible from ourselves. Working on assignments based on contingency fees is never an option. In other words, we can't agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. 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 (or simply "USPAP") explicitly 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", or "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 provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With M.G. Cangelose and Associates, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, honest service.