Dora Rohal provides honest and ethical appraisals for Bucks County

Honesty and Integrity: Burgundy Appraisals

Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. So it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can definitely be dubbed a profession as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we must follow strict ethical considerations.

We have a lot of obligations as appraisers, but first and foremost we answer to our clients. Typically, in residential practice, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal, and often the appraisal is ordered by a third party the lender has contracted in order to maintain independence. Subsequently, appraisers are typically limited to only disclosing their findings to their clients, so as a homeowner, if you want to review an appraisal report, you normally have to get it from your lender.

Other obligations include accurate figures appropriate to the parameters of the assignment, attaining and sustaining a certain level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is standard operating procedure for us at Burgundy Appraisals.

In some cases appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, including homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is only to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.


	Burgundy Appraisals has worked hard for its track record for performing competent and ethically superior appraisals. To learn more, contact us.

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

We only perform to the highest ethical standards possible. Doing orders based on contingency fees is never an option. That is, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. Anyone should be able to see that inflating a value to achieve a bigger fee is unethical! We set ourselves to a higher standard.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") also describes 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", or "the amount of a value opinion" in addition to other situations We follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are doing everything we can to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Burgundy Appraisals, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, professional service.