Honesty and Integrity: CLL Appraisals, LLC

Appraising is generally a long term career. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. That's why it goes without question in this day and age that real estate appraisal can certainly be called a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we are bound by an ethical code.

We have a lot of responsibilities as appraisers but our chief duty is to our clients. Typically, for a regular residential appraisal, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal. Appraisers have certain duties of privacy to their clients, and as a homeowner, if you desire to review the appraisal document, you normally have to obtain it from your lender. Other responsibilities also include, numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, reaching and maintaining an adequate level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics is just normal course of business for us at CLL Appraisals, LLC.

Appraisers will often 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 the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is limited to those parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the job.

There are also ethical duties that have nothing to do with clients and others. For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for at least five years - at CLL Appraisals, LLC you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

CLL Appraisals, LLC holds itself to the industry standards and rules set in place for ethics. We can't accept anything less from ourselves. We have a responsibility not to do assignments on contingency fees. 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 probably the appraisal professions most important rule, because it would tend to make appraisers inflate the value of homes or properties to increase their paycheck. We set ourselves to a higher standard. Other improper practices may be established by state law or professional organizations to which an appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also 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," "the amount of a value opinion," in addition to other situations We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are doing everything we can to objectively determine the home or property value.

With CLL Appraisals, LLC, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, professional service.