The need for appraisers to know the intended use of a report has been around a long time, long before 'Scope of Work' became the current buzzword. We have always been required to identify the Client and the purpose and the intended use of the report.
This doesn't have to be a big deal. Simply tell your clients that in order to give them the type of appraisal and report they need, you'll need to know what their intended use is. If they slough you off and say "its for a loan", then take them at their word and write your appraisal report up accordingly, "intended use is for loan purposes".
You shouldn't be operating off of verbal orders anyway. At least get your clients to engage you with a written order, faxed over or e-mailed. If its a little more detailed than all the better. The more they spell out what they want and expect from you, the more covered you are in giving it to them. Then they can't come back at you later and say they ordered more than they did.
Honestly, for those appraisers who are already including even a minimal Scope of Work disclosure in an attempt to comply with the current standards, they are already 95% covered; they may (or may not) only need to tweak what they are already doing. Just take your time, think your way through it for a few minutes and you won't have any trouble writing one up that will cover a good percentage of your work product. You'll need to make some minor adjustments to accomodate the different uses of your reports (there aren't that many different uses), so you may end up with 4 or 5 different versions. You'll likely only use 2 or 3 variations of one of them on a regular basis, depending on the type of work you are doing.
I'd take a stab at writing a 'standard' one up for anyone to use, but then it would get donwloaded and used everywhere verbatim, even for those uses it doesn't fit. If you write your own, you'll be familiar which details of it don't apply in its different uses. Actually, I already wrote one up for the mythical pre-comp assignment. You could probably take that one and make some changes. Whatever you do, use the right tool for the job.
Incidentally, the pre-comp thing was just thrown out there as an example, as one possibility. I didn't mean to get anyone worked up that it would somehow replace any comprehensive appraisal product because I don't see how it could be used for anything other than it's stated intended use. If an appraiser were going to do a desktop appraisal, they would want to build a more comprehensive work product, possibly requiring a grid analysis, inspection report and photos by a licensed home inspector, personal verification of all the sales comparables, etc. Such a process would not be cheap. The only reason I used the pre-comp thing as an example is that there are still appraisers out there providing such services for free and without any type of protection in the way of documentation and disclosures. Don't do that. If you're going to do appraisals on the quick and them give them away, at least protect yourself by doing them in a (somewhat) defendable manner.
As always, we need to figure out how to use these standards to provide our clients with the type of services that will serve their legitimate needs, and protect ourselves at the same time. Oh yeah, and make money doing it. I reckon that if we didn't do free undocumented appraisal work and resorted to a more legitimate product, that we would not only make a little more money, but would also do fewer 'wasted' appraisals where everyone is mad at the appraiser because the value didn't come in.
George Hatch
George Hatch
