Honesty and Integrity: Laura V Stehling Appraisals

We have a lot of obligations as appraisers, but our main duty is to our clients. Normally, for a regular 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 contracted in order to maintain independence. Thereon, appraisers are privy to a lot of information, and like an attorney, can only discuss many of these matters with their client. As a homeowner, if you desire to review an appraisal report, you generally have to get it from your lender and not the appraiser.

Other responsibilities include accurate sums appropriate to the nature of the assignment, acquiring and keeping a certain level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is just normal course of business for us at Laura V Stehling Appraisals.

There are some scenarios in which appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, both sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is limited to those third parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.

	Laura V Stehling Appraisals has worked hard for its reputation for producing appraisals with the highest of ethics. Contact us today to learn more.

Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must keep their work files for at least five years - at Laura V Stehling Appraisals you can rest assured that we stick to that rule.

We require the highest ethical standards possible from ourselves. Accepting orders based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. In other words, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. It should be apparent to anyone that fabricating a property's value to achieve a higher paycheck is unethical!

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") explicitly defines unethical behavior as the acceptance 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 follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are doing everything we can to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

As soon as you engage Laura V Stehling Appraisals, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you expect along with the honesty and integrity we're known for.