W. Brad Hollis Appraisals maintains the highest professional ethics

Generally, appraising a long term career. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. So it goes without question in this day and age that real estate appraisal can certainly be dubbed a profession as opposed to a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we have a strict ethical code.

We have many responsibilities as appraisers but our chief duty is to our clients. Generally, for a normal residential appraisal, the lender places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers are privy to a lot of information, and like an attorney can only discuss many matters with their client. As a homeowner, if you want to review an appraisal report, you should get it through your lender. Other responsibilities also include, numerical accuracy depending on the assignment's nature, attaining and maintaining a certain level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics is is what we do everyday at W. Brad Hollis Appraisals.

Appraisers will regularly need to consider the interests of third parties, including homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are listed in 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 job.

There are also ethical rules that have nothing to do with whom we share information. For example, appraisers must backup their work files for at least five years - at W. Brad Hollis Appraisals you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

We demand the highest ethical standards possible from ourselves. We don't do assignments on contingency fees. That is, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. We can't do assignments on percentage fees. That is probably the appraisal industries biggest taboo, because it would invite appraisal fraud since increasing the estimate of the home would increase the their paycheck. We don't do that. Other unprofessional practices may be established by state law or professional organizations that the appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also 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," "the amount of a value opinion," in addition to 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 W. Brad Hollis Appraisals, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, professional service.