DAS Appraisals provides honest and ethical appraisals for Rockland County

Honesty and Integrity: DAS Appraisals

Typically, appraising is a long term career. Requirements to become a licensed appraiser have become more difficult than ever before. So it goes without question these days that real estate appraisal can definitely be called a profession rather than a trade. In our field, as with any profession, we must follow strict ethical considerations.

We have many obligations as appraisers, but above everything we answer to our clients. More often than not, in residential practice, the appraiser's client is the lender ordering the appraisal, and often the appraisal is ordered by a third party the lender has contracted in order to maintain independence. Consequently, appraisers have certain duties of privacy to their clients, plus strict rules and regulations to which we must adhere. As a homeowner, if you desire to review an appraisal report, you normally should request it through your lender instead of the appraiser.

Other obligations include accurate sums appropriate to the nature of the assignment, attaining and maintaining an appropriate level of competency and education, and the appraiser must conduct him or herself as a professional. Maintaining high ethics is standard operating procedure for us at DAS Appraisals.

Appraisers will frequently need to consider the interests of third parties, such as homeowners, sellers and buyers, or others. Those third parties normally are defined in the appraisal assignment itself. An appraiser's fiduciary role is restricted to those parties who the appraiser is aware of, based on the scope of work or other things in the framework of the order.

DAS Appraisals has an established track record for performing 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 be able to produce their work files for a minimum of five years - something else DAS Appraisals takes very seriously.

We require the highest professional integrity possible from ourselves. Working on orders where our fee is dependent on our value conclusion is never an option. That is, we don't agree to do an appraisal report and base our pay upon coming up with a particular value conclusion. Anyone should be able to see that fabricating a home's value to achieve essentially a bigger fee is unethical! We set ourselves to a higher standard.

Finally, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice explicitly defines a violation in ethics 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 diligently follow these rules to the letter which means you can be assured we are going above and beyond to provide an unbiased determination of the home or property value.

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