An appraiser is one who has the professional knowledge and the required experience to evaluate the value of an asset or the cost of occurrence of an event. An appraiser generally acts independently of the buyer or the seller and it is the appraiser who gives a real estimate of the value of a particular commodity or an asset. The most common type of appraisers are the real estate appraisers whose main job is to evaluate the cost of a particular property in order to facilitate appropriate tax payments, determine the mortgage value of a property or the selling price of a property.
An appraiser can be hired by any insurance company or even by banks and other multinational companies in order to give them an estimate on various properties. Appraisers should generally be employed in their locality so that they are aware of any environmental or other factors that might affect the effective value of a property. There are many factors which the appraisers use as benchmarks while deciding the approximate value of a property. For example location of the property is a major issue, a property located in the city or near hospital or schools and has easy access to national highways are generally priced higher than those which do not have the above properties. They should also take into consideration the condition of the building for example the basement, the roof and other parts in order to analyze the cost.
After completing his observation, an appraiser has to combine all the above factors and then decide what the real cost of the property should be. Real estate appraisers are generally specialized in the field of their work and thus work on a particular type of property only. They are generally hired by clients and work on only one property at a time.