Residential Services Northwest provides honest and ethical appraisals for Pierce County

Residential Services Northwest upholds the highest professional ethics

Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. So it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can certainly be dubbed a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we are bound by ethical considerations.

An appraiser's main obligation is to their client. Generally, in residential practice, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. 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 a copy of an appraisal report, you generally have to get it via your lender instead of the appraiser.

Other obligations include numerical accuracy depending on the assignment's nature, acquiring and keeping an adequate level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics is just normal course of business for us at Residential Services Northwest.

Appraisers will frequently need to consider the interests of third parties, including homeowners, 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 limited to those parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.


	Residential Services Northwest has an established track record for performing appraisals with the highest of ethics. To learn more, contact us.

Appraisers also have duties outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for at least five years - at Residential Services Northwest you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule.

We require the highest professional integrity possible from ourselves. Doing orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. That means we can'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 an unsubstantiated value with the reward of getting paid more money! We just don't do it.

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" in addition to other situations We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be at ease knowing we are working hard to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

As soon as you order an appraisal from Residential Services Northwest, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you deserve along with the principles we're known for.