For honest and ethical appraisals, count on CW alamode

We have a great deal of obligations as appraisers, but our chief duty is to our clients. More often than not, for a typical 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 hired in order to maintain independence. Consequently, 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 desire to review the appraisal document, you generally have to get it through your lender.

Other responsibilities include numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, attaining and keeping an adequate level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics is just normal course of business for us at CW alamode.

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

	CW alamode has worked hard for its reputation for producing competent and ethically superior appraisals. To learn more, contact us.

Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must backup their work files for at least five years - at CW alamode you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule.

When creating reports, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Doing assignments based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. In other words, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. There's certainly a 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 states 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 diligently 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.

As soon as you engage CW alamode, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you deserve along with the high ethical standards we're known for.