Newz: Appraisal Stress Test, AQB Exposure Draft Removes College Degree Requirement
June 26, 2026
What’s in This Newsletter (In Order, Scroll Down)
- LIA AD: State Board Complaint Frustrations
- The Appraisal Profession Is Being Stress-Tested. That’s Not the Same as Being Replaced By Jessica Sturm
- All About the Brownstone: How the Iconic Design Went From Humble Row House Roots to Million-Dollar Metropolis Luxury
- MY AD: UAD 3.6 Software Evaluation Checklist By Doug Smith
- Include E&O in Appraisal Reports? Just Say No By Isaac Peck
- AQB second exposure draft removes college degree requirement
- MBA STATS: Mortgage applications increased 1.0 percent from one week earlier
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The Appraisal Profession Is Being Stress-Tested.
That’s Not the Same as Being Replaced
A frank conversation about UAD 3.6, waiver expansion, and where the real opportunity lies.
By Written by : Jessica Sturm, EVP of Property Services at Opteon.
Excerpts:
What UAD 3.6 Actually Changes (And What It Doesn’t)
UAD 3.6 changes the infrastructure around how appraisal judgment is captured, structured, and delivered. It does not change what a great appraiser does and the value they bring. Your ability to walk a property and know, as a trained professional, that the finished basement wasn’t permitted, that the kitchen renovation was done on the cheap or that the comparable three streets over sold under pressure. None of that local, industry expertise lives in a data schema.
What the new standard demands is that the mechanics around that judgment are handled cleanly and consistently. Field data capture, structured commentary, condition ratings, quality flags, all in a format that downstream systems can use. That’s not a threat to expertise. We see this as a long-overdue investment in the infrastructure that supports our industry.
What the Stress Test Is Really Asking
Every industry stress test asks the same question: who is built for what comes next?
UAD 3.6 is asking whether the profession can operate with greater rigor and efficiency. Waiver expansion is asking whether appraisers can own the complex, high stakes, advisory end of the market with real authority. The mature appraiser pipeline is asking whether the profession can retain experience and retrain while bringing in and developing new people. These are hard questions, but the profession has more tools, more data, and more support to answer them than at any point in its history.
Accounting faced the same reckoning. When tax software arrived and then matured, the prediction was that it would hollow out the profession. Routine compliance work did automate and what happened next was the opposite of collapse.
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My comments: Interesting analysis. I think the new reports are much better than the old forms for reviewers and borrowers. If I was doing GSE appraisals I would look forward to doing them.
