Ralph Martin & Associates, Inc. upholds the highest professional ethics

The appraiser's primary obligation is to their client. Typically, for a normal 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 have certain duties of confidentiality to their clients, plus many rules and regulations that must be followed. As a homeowner, if you desire to review an appraisal report, you generally have to get it from your lender.

Other obligations include accurate figures appropriate to the nature of the report, attaining and keeping a particular level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics is just normal course of business for us at Ralph Martin & Associates, Inc..

Appraisers may sometimes have fiduciary obligations to third parties, such as homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are listed in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary responsibility is restricted to those third parties who the appraiser knows, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the job.

	Ralph Martin & Associates, Inc. has worked hard for its reputation for performing appraisals with the highest of ethics. To learn more, contact us.

Appraisers also have rules outside of boundaries of with whom we share information For example, appraisers must keep their work files for a minimum of five years - something else Ralph Martin & Associates, Inc. diligently adheres to.

We require the highest ethical standards possible from ourselves. Working on orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is not something we can consider. In other words, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. It should be obvious that fabricating a property's value to achieve essentially a bigger fee is unethical! We just don't do it.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (or simply "USPAP") clearly states 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 follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are working hard to objectively determine the home or property value.

With Ralph Martin & Associates, Inc., you won't have any doubts that you're receiving 100 percent ethical, honest service.