Lone Star Appraisals provides honest and ethical appraisals for Midland County

Lone Star Appraisals maintains the utmost professional ethics

We think of our business as a profession. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have increased more than ever before. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can certainly be dubbed a profession rather than a trade. As with any profession we are bound by an ethical code.

An appraiser's chief responsibility is to their client. Typically, for a standard residential appraisal, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. It follows that appraisers are privy to a lot of data, and like an attorney, can only discuss many of these matters with their client. As a homeowner, if you would like to review the appraisal document, you generally should obtain it from your lender and not the appraiser.

Other obligations include accurate figures appropriate to the scope of the assignment, attaining and keeping 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 just normal course of business for us at Lone Star Appraisals.

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


	Lone Star Appraisals has worked hard for its reputation for performing competent and ethically superior appraisals. Contact us today to learn more.

There are also ethical standards that have nothing to do with whom we share information. For example, appraisers must keep their work files for at least five years - at Lone Star Appraisals you can rest assured that we adhere to that rule.

When working on an order, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Working on orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is never an option. That means we are not able to agree to do an appraisal report and collect the fee only if the loan closes. There's a definite conflict of interest if an appraiser can report an unsubstantiated value and then get paid more money! We set ourselves to a higher standard.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") explicitly states 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" as well as other situations. We follow these rules to the letter which means you can rest easy knowing we are working hard to objectively determine the home or property value.

With Lone Star Appraisals, you can be assured of 100 percent ethical, honest service.