JE Phillips Appraisals maintains the utmost professional ethics

We think of our job as a profession. 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 definitely be considered a profession as opposed to a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.

We have many responsibilities as appraisers but our primary duty is to our clients. Typically, for a regular residential appraisal, the lender places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers are privy to a lot of data, and like an attorney can only discuss many matters with their client. As a homeowner, if you want to review an appraisal report, you generally have to get it from your lender. Other obligations also include, numerical accuracy depending on the assignment parameters, attaining and maintaining a particular level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is just normal course of business for us at JE Phillips Appraisals.

Appraisers will frequently be obligated to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the assignment.

Appraisers also have duties outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for at least five years - at JE Phillips Appraisals you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

JE Phillips Appraisals holds itself to the industry standards and guidelines set in place for professional behavior. We can't accept anything less from ourselves. Working on orders that contingency fees is not something we can consider That is, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. We can't do assignments on percentage fees. That is perhaps the appraisal industries most important rule, because it would invite fraudulent practices since increasing the estimate of the home would up the their paycheck. We don't do that. Other unethical practices may be established by state law or professional organizations that the appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also states a violation in ethics 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," "the amount of a value opinion," in addition to other situations We follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are going above and beyond to objectively determine the home or property value.

With JE Phillips Appraisals, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, honest service.