Honesty and Integrity: Benefiel Appraisal Service

We have many obligations as appraisers, but our chief duty is to our clients. Typically, in residential practice, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Subsequently, appraisers are typically restricted to only disclosing their findings to their clients, so as a homeowner, if you desire to review the appraisal document, you normally have to obtain it from your lender instead of the appraiser.

Other obligations include accurate sums appropriate to the nature of the report, acquiring and sustaining 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 Benefiel Appraisal Service.

There are some scenarios in which appraisers will have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are listed in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is only to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the order.

	Benefiel Appraisal Service has an established track record for completing competent and ethically superior appraisals. To learn more, contact us.

Appraisers also have standards outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must backup their work files for at least five years - at Benefiel Appraisal Service you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

We require the highest professional integrity possible from ourselves. Doing orders based on contingency fees is never an option. That means we don't agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. There's certainly a conflict of interest if an appraiser can report an unsubstantiated value and then get paid more money!

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice also describes 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", or "the amount of a value opinion" as well as other situations. We follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are working hard to objectively determine the home or property value.

With Benefiel Appraisal Service, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, honest service.