Devin Wilkins provides honest and ethical appraisals for Washington County

Honesty and Integrity: Devin Wilkins

Appraising is a profession, and appraisers are professionals. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever in the past. So it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can unquestionably be considered a profession as opposed to a trade. As with any profession we must follow strict ethical considerations.

We have a lot of responsibilities as appraisers, but our primary duty is to our clients. Typically, for a regular 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 contracted in order to maintain independence. Certain elements relating to an assignment are to be shared exclusively with the appraiser's client. So, as a homeowner, if you want to review the appraisal document, you generally should request it through your lender.

Other responsibilities include numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, reaching and sustaining an appropriate level of competency and education, and of course, the appraiser must behave in a professional manner. Maintaining high ethics and client confidentiality is standard operating procedure for us at Devin Wilkins.

Appraisers may regularly have fiduciary obligations 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 third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the assignment.


	Devin Wilkins has an established reputation for performing appraisals with the highest of ethics. To learn more, contact us.

Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of clients and others. For example, appraisers must keep their work files for a minimum of five years - at Devin Wilkins you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

Devin Wilkins holds itself to the industry standards and guidelines set in place for ethics. We won't accept anything less from ourselves. Doing orders based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. That is, we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. Anyone should be able to see that fabricating a property's value to achieve what amounts to a bigger fee is unethical! This isn't how we operate.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") clearly defines unethical behavior 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 follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Devin Wilkins, you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, professional service.