Notes from Collateral Risk Network (CRN) D.C. – The New Uniform Appraisal Dataset 3.6 Ends the “Form-First” Era

By Vin Vomero, CEO, FoxyAI

If there was a theme at last week’s Collateral Risk Network (CRN) member meeting in Washington, D.C., it was: Appraisal Reporting is finally catching up to the way the rest of the finance ecosystem handles information.

Liz Green, Senior Vice President, Valuation Services at ServiceLink, called the new Uniform Appraisal Dataset (UAD) 3.6 “the most highly engineered technical specification for presenting business information in a structured reporting layout” our industry has seen in decades.

The might sound like a lot, but the takeaway is simple—the data now drives the report, not the other way around.

From Forms to a Data Product

Under the previous UAD 2.6, a form was filled out, and software exported an XML file as a by-product. In UAD 3.6, the paradigm is inverted—the XML is the source of truth, and the appraisal report is rendered from it.

Deliver of the data package is now streamlined and enforced by the Uniform Collateral Data Portal (UCDP) into a single Zip file with the XML, the appraisal PDF, and an images folder.

Rules that Reduce Rework and Contradictory Information

The new structure isn’t just prettier, it’s enforceable. The form has been redesigned into 29 sections that appear when they matter. A Common Core baseline group of sections is always shown—e.g. Summary, Assignment, Subject, Site/Sketch, Unit Interior, Dwelling Exterior, Overall Quality & Condition, Market, Reconciliation, and so on. The rest—e.g. Disaster Mitigation, Energy/Green, Outbuildings, Manufactured Homes, Rental/Income Cost, Revision History—are conditionally used depending on the subject property.

In other words, readers will now see what’s pertinent and nothing else.

For example, in the Defects, Damages, and Deficiencies (DDD) Section, if the “Market Value Condition” is “Subject to Repair”, the evaluator must list at least one corresponding item. If any item’s “Recommended Action” is “Repair” or “Inspection”, the report can’t be concluded with “As-Is”. Conversely, items that don’t require action can be tagged “None” and still support an “As-Is” conclusion.

This is the kind of logic that prevents contradictory narratives before they leave anyone’s desktop.

Why This Matters

For lenders and appraisal management companies (AMCs), this means cleaner reviews, fewer conditions for follow-up, and a far better audit trail. For appraisers, it means less ambiguity and less duplication.

Importantly, UAD 3.6 will also nudge the industry’s field practices tech-forward quickly. Currently, only ~30% of appraisers report having used mobile tech today, and as UAD 3.6 clearly rewards structured capture at the source—photos where they belong, repeatable sections, and discrete data over free-form text—adoption should become mainstream quickly.

The Bottom Line

UAD 3.6 isn’t just a new 1004 (Residential Appraiser Form); it’s a standardized data model with a report on top. The shift may feel very technical at first, but it ultimately gives industry participants the ability to spend more time analyzing instead of formatting. Embracing the structure will ensure that the ecosystem’s reports will get clearer, reviews will get shorter, and clients will get what they’ve wanted all along—credible work that reads as cleanly as it was built.