Farmer Appraisals provides honest and ethical appraisals for Midland County

Honesty and Integrity: Farmer Appraisals

We consider our job 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 considered a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.

The appraiser's chief obligation is to their client. More often than not, in residential practice, the lender (or an agent of the lender) places the order to the appraiser, becoming the appraiser's client. Consequently, appraisers have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus many rules and regulations that must be followed. So, as a homeowner, if you want to obtain a copy of an appraisal report, you generally should obtain it through your lender and not the appraiser.

Other obligations include accurate figures appropriate to the scope of the report, reaching and maintaining a certain level of competency and education, and naturally, the appraiser must bear a professional demeanor. Maintaining high ethics is standard operating procedure for us at Farmer Appraisals.

Appraisers may often have fiduciary obligations to third parties, such as homeowners, both buyers and sellers, or others. Normally the third parties are clearly defined in the appraisal report. An appraiser's fiduciary role is limited to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the order.

Farmer Appraisals has worked hard for its track record for completing competent and ethically superior appraisals. To learn more, contact us.


There are also ethical rules that have nothing to do with clients and others. For example, appraisers must be able to produce their work files for at least five years - at Farmer Appraisals you can rest assured that we abide by that rule.

Farmer Appraisals holds itself to the industry standards and mandates set in place for ethics. We refuse to accept anything less from ourselves. 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 collect payment on the contingency of the loan closing. There's certainly a 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 (or simply "USPAP") 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 follow these rules to the letter which means you can be at ease knowing we are doing everything we can to objectively determine the home or property value.

As soon as you order an appraisal from Farmer Appraisals, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you expect along with the high ethical standards we're known for.