Saffel Appraisal Services provides honest and ethical appraisals for King County

Honesty and Integrity: Saffel Appraisal Services

Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have increased more 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 as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we are bound by an ethical code.

The appraiser's chief responsibility is to their client. Most of the time, 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 information to their clients, so as a homeowner, if you would like a copy of the appraisal document, you generally should get it via your lender and not the appraiser.

Other responsibilities include numerical accuracy depending on the assignment parameters, reaching and sustaining a particular level of competency and education, and naturally, the appraiser must bear a professional demeanor. Maintaining high ethics is standard operating procedure for us at Saffel Appraisal Services.

Appraisers may also have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, such as homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is limited to those third parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.


	Saffel Appraisal Services has an established reputation 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 store their work files for a minimum of five years - at Saffel Appraisal Services you can rest assured that we stick to that rule.

Saffel Appraisal Services holds itself to the industry standards and rules set in place for professional behavior. We can't accept anything less from ourselves. Working on orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. That means we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. There's a definite conflict of interest if an appraiser can report a larger value with the reward of getting paid more money! This isn't how we operate.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice explicitly states 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" in addition to other situations We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be confident we are working hard to objectively determine the home or property value.

With Saffel Appraisal Services, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, honest service.