For honest and ethical appraisals, count on Davidson & Associates

We have many responsibilities as appraisers, but above everything we answer to our clients. Typically, for a normal residential appraisal, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Thereon, appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus many rules and regulations that must be followed. As a homeowner, if you want to obtain a copy of the appraisal document, you generally have to get it through your lender instead of the appraiser.

Other responsibilities include numerical accuracy depending on the assignment parameters, acquiring and keeping a certain level of competency and education, and naturally, the appraiser must bear a professional demeanor. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is what we do every day at Davidson & Associates.

Appraisers will sometimes be obligated to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Typically the third parties are specifically defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary duty 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.

	Davidson & Associates has worked hard for its reputation for providing 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 keep their work files for at least five years - at Davidson & Associates you can rest assured that we stick to that rule.

We meet or exceed the industry standards and rules set in place for ethics. We refuse to accept anything less from ourselves. Working on assignments where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. That means we don't agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. There's a definite conflict of interest if an appraiser can report a larger 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 defines 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" as well as other situations. We follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

When you order an appraisal from Davidson & Associates, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you expect along with the business principles we're known for.