 For honest and ethical appraisals, rely on The Castillo Group, LLCAppraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can certainly be considered a profession as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we have a strict ethical code.
An appraiser's chief responsibility is to their client.
Typically, in residential practice, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal, and often the appraisal is ordered by a third party the lender has retained to maintain independence.
It follows that appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations to which we must adhere. As
a homeowner, if you would like to review the appraisal document, you generally should obtain it via your lender and not the appraiser.
Appraisers will often need to consider the interests of third parties, including homeowners, both sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is only to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the job.
Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must store their work files for a minimum of five years - something else The Castillo Group, LLC takes very seriously. We demand the highest ethical standards possible from ourselves. Working on orders based on contingency fees is never an option. That means we can't agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. Anyone should be able to see that inflating a value to achieve what amounts to a higher paycheck is unethical! Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice clearly 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 rest easy knowing we are working hard to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value. With The Castillo Group, LLC, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, professional service. |
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