Jim Taylor provides honest and ethical appraisals for Bartholomew County

Jim Taylor upholds the utmost professional ethics

By and large, appraising is a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever in the past. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can unquestionably be dubbed a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.

An appraiser's chief responsibility is to their client. Generally, for a normal residential appraisal, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. 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 desire to obtain a copy of an appraisal report, you generally should obtain it via your lender and not the appraiser.

Other responsibilities include accurate sums appropriate to the nature of the report, attaining and maintaining 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 what we do every day at Jim Taylor.

Appraisers will sometimes need to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are listed in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is only to those third parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the assignment.


	Jim Taylor has worked hard for its track record for producing appraisals with the highest of ethics. To learn more, contact us.

There are also ethical standards that have nothing to do with clients and others. For example, appraisers must store their work files for a minimum of five years - at Jim Taylor you can rest assured that we stick to that rule.

When working on an order, we follow the highest ethical standards possible. Working on assignments based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. That means we can't agree to do an appraisal report and get paid only if the loan closes. There's an obvious conflict of interest if an appraiser can report an unsubstantiated value and then get paid more money! This isn't how we operate.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") explicitly describes 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" as well as other situations. We diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are doing everything we can to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

With Jim Taylor, you won't have any doubts that you're getting 100 percent ethical, professional service.