Ballew & Company provides honest and ethical appraisals for Sacramento County

Honesty and Integrity: Ballew & Company

We think of what we do as a profession. The rigors of becoming a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. That's why it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can definitely be called a profession as opposed to a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we have a strict ethical code.

We have a lot of obligations as appraisers, but our primary duty is to our clients. 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's important to know that a lot of details relating to an assignment are to be discussed exclusively with the appraiser's client. As a homeowner, if you desire a copy of an appraisal report, you normally have to request it via your lender.

Other obligations include numerical accuracy depending on the scope of the assignment, reaching and sustaining a particular level of competency and education, and naturally, the appraiser must bear a professional demeanor. Maintaining high ethics is standard operating procedure for us at Ballew & Company.

Appraisers may sometimes have fiduciary responsibilities to third parties, including homeowners, buyers and sellers, or others. Those third parties normally are spelled out in scope of the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary duty is limited to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other written parameters of the job.


	Ballew & Company has an established reputation for providing competent and ethically superior appraisals. To learn more, contact us.

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

We require the highest ethical standards possible from ourselves. Accepting orders based on contingency fees is not something we can consider. That means we can't agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. It should be obvious that inflating a value to achieve a higher paycheck is unethical! This isn't how we operate.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice also describes 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 assured we are going above and beyond to objectively determine the home or property value.

As soon as you request an appraisal from Ballew & Company, we'll make sure you're getting the professional service you deserve along with the honesty and integrity we're known for.