Honesty and Integrity: Walker & Associates

We have a lot of responsibilities as appraisers, but our chief duty is to our clients. Typically, for a normal residential appraisal, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal, and often the appraisal is ordered by a third party the lender has hired in order to maintain independence. Thereon, appraisers are typically limited to only disclosing information to their clients, so as a homeowner, if you desire to obtain a copy of the appraisal document, you generally should obtain it through your lender instead of the appraiser.

Other responsibilities include accurate sums appropriate to the scope of the assignment, reaching and sustaining an adequate level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics is standard operating procedure for us at Walker & Associates.

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

	Walker & Associates has an established track record for producing appraisals with the highest of ethics. Contact us today to learn more.

Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must keep their work files for a minimum of five years - at Walker & Associates you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

We only perform to the highest ethical standards possible. Working on orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. In other words, we can't agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. It should be obvious that inflating a value to achieve essentially a higher fee is unethical! We set ourselves to a higher standard.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") also states 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", or "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 working hard to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Walker & Associates, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, honest service.