Honesty and Integrity: Cherry Appraisal Company, LLC

Appraising is generally a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can unquestionably be called a profession rather than a trade. As with any profession we must follow strict ethical considerations.

We have many obligations as appraisers but above everything we answer to our clients. Typically, for a normal residential appraisal, the lender places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Appraisers have rules and regulations they must follow, including keeping many matters private for their clients 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 parameters, reaching and keeping a respectable 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 Cherry Appraisal Company, LLC.

Appraisers will sometimes 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 roll is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.

Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must backup their work files for at least five years - at Cherry Appraisal Company, LLC you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule.

We meet or beat the industry standards and guidelines set in place for professional behavior. We can't accept anything less from ourselves. We never do assignments on contingency fees. That is, we can't agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. We don't do assignments on percentage fees. That is perhaps the appraisal professions biggest no-no, because it would invite fraudulent practices since raising the value of the home would raise the fee. We set ourselves to a higher standard. Other unethical practices may be established by state law or professional organizations to which an appraiser belongs.

The Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) also states unethical behavior 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," as well as other situations. We follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Cherry Appraisal Company, LLC, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, professional service.