Tag Archive for: appraisal business

The New URAR: Finally, Uniform

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Since I started in this profession, we’ve been filling out something called the “Uniform Residential Appraisal Report.” URAR. A tidy acronym, an orderly idea. The problem, of course, is that it wasn’t uniform. Not by a long shot.

There was a form for a single-family house. Another for a condo. Another for a two- to four-unit property. Yet another for a manufactured home. You could practically fill a filing cabinet with the different “uniform” forms. Each one with its own quirks, limitations, and yes, checkboxes. Lots of checkboxes.

The first URAR came into the world in 1986, when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac decided it might be nice if appraisers stopped sending in reports written on the backs of napkins or, worse, dictated into a tape recorder and transcribed by the typist down the hall.

By the mid-1990s, the form had become the backbone of mortgage lending. Every residential loan needed one. The problem was that “residential” meant a lot of things. It meant one house on one lot, sure. But it also meant a condo in Miami Beach, a duplex in Des Moines, or a manufactured home sitting proudly on a quarter-acre halfway between Humboldt and Gadsden.

Each property type came with its own form. Each form came with its own rules. Each rule came with its own set of misunderstandings.

So, what was “uniform” about it? Not much. If you were appraising only single-family homes in subdivisions, you might get away with only using the URAR. But step outside the tidy framework of cookie-cutter houses, and you’d need another form, an addendum, or some cobbled-together franken-design mess to tell the story. I have passed on condo appraisals in the past just to avoid dealing with the condo form.

The new URAR adapts to our needs. If the property has two units, the report expands. If it’s a condo, different sections appear. If it’s a manufactured home, the right data fields show up automatically. You no longer have to select from a menu of forms; the report builds itself around the property you’re analyzing.

It’s flexible, but structured. It’s detailed, but readable.

For the first time, lenders, regulators, and appraisers are all looking at the same thing. Not a PDF that tells a story one way for the reader and another for the database, but a unified, structured document that preserves the narrative and the data in one place.

For too long, we’ve treated appraisal as a stack of paperwork. The new URAR reframes it as a flow of data and analysis. The appraiser’s job is not to fill in blanks; it’s to interpret reality and record it in a way that others can trust, read, and reuse.

For too long, we’ve treated appraisal as a stack of paperwork. The new URAR reframes it as a flow of data and analysis. The appraiser’s job is not to fill in blanks; it’s to interpret reality and record it in a way that others can trust, read, and reuse.

Because a single-family home in Denver and a fourplex in Detroit don’t look alike, but they share the same fundamentals: location, condition, quality, and market forces. The new framework recognizes that and organizes it accordingly.

The story is still ours to tell, but the structure lets that story travel farther.

If, like me, you’ve been doing this a while, you might be tired of hearing about “big changes.” Every few years, someone promises revolution and delivers another PDF.

This one’s different.

The URAR redesign isn’t about forms, it’s about how we communicate. The goal isn’t to make the job harder; it’s to make the work more meaningful. The new report gives us room to explain, to narrate, to analyze. The structured data captures what’s measurable. The commentary captures what’s human. It’s a marriage of logic and judgment, of code and craft. Lenders get cleaner data. Regulators get consistency. Reviewers get clarity. Borrowers get transparency.

But the real winners might be the appraisers who adapt early. Because this isn’t just a technical update. It’s the new language and grammar of valuation. And those who learn to speak it fluently will find themselves more valuable than ever.

When you strip away the noise, the new URAR is about credibility. It says: here’s what the property is, here’s how I know, and here’s the data to back it up.

That’s what investors want. That’s what lenders need. And that’s what we’ve always tried to deliver, but with a mishmash of forms and addenda, and a mind-numbing complexity in presentation.

So yes, the new URAR finally earns its name. After all these years, “uniform” means something.

One report. One language. One process for every residential property type.

It’s the same notion we started with in 1986, but this time, we’ve got the technology and the discipline to make it work.

And maybe, if we get it right, the next generation of appraisers won’t have to explain what “uniform” was supposed to mean in the first place.

 

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When Your Business Races Ahead of You

AeL partner Hal Humphreys reflects on the mixed blessing of sudden, rapid growth for small business owners.

Last week, over at our sister education company PI Education, we hosted our first webinar since last spring. It’s been a long and accidental hiatus, occasioned by things that are, in theory, good: busy times for our various businesses and endeavors. Storyboard EMP, the parent company of Appraiser eLearning and PIed, grew fast in surprising ways. I had more work travel this year than ever before: some conferences and in-person teaching all over the country, from California to the Carolinas. Kim, my wife and the company’s creative director, sold a manuscript she’s been working on for almost a decade, which meant a new burst of editing and recipe-testing. All good things, but it left us with the feeling of sprinting to catch a train that was already leaving the station, accelerating fast.

This is a common problem for people running a small, bootstrapped business: Your staff and infrastructure are often bare bones — enough to keep things running just fine in normal times, but stressed to the max when emergencies or sudden growth ensue. We found that out the hard way last winter and spring, as a surprise regulatory change drove thousands of new buyers to a course they suddenly needed … urgently. Sure, having that course ready to go was perhaps an example of “Luck favors the ready.” But what we weren’t ready for was planning a 12-stop national ANSI Roadshow teaching tour with only a few weeks’ notice. And we struggled to figure out how to seamlessly deliver electronic class materials and CE certificates to new customers, who attended our in-person classes precisely because they don’t like taking courses online. For a very small, bootstrapped company, the deluge of helpline calls and messages from people trying to navigate logins and downloads left us with our lips barely above the surging waters.

This is a common problem for people running a small business: Your staff and infrastructure are often bare bones — enough to keep things running just fine in normal times, but stressed to the max when emergencies or sudden growth ensue.

We needed a better system to manage the demands of event-planning and logistics — and help requests from customers who are new to our tech. Great customer service matters to us, and we wanted to take every call and help every person who needed it.

But the waters were rising.

I thought about this a lot last week during our P.I. webinar with Leah Wietholter, a forensic accountant, fraud investigator, and the author of a new book called DATA SLEUTH. Leah’s book is all about applying systems to the work she does. For me, it was a revelation. In the book, Leah wrote candidly about her struggles with hiring and training employees over the years, as her business grew — sometimes faster than she could adapt. One thing in particular struck a chord with me: Too often, when an employee would ask her how to do a thing or solve a problem, she’d say, essentially, “Move over. Let me look at it.”

That sounded familiar. I’ve struggled with that, as an appraiser and entrepreneur: the need to have my hands on everything. I’m pretty sure I’m not alone in this.

Here’s the problem: To the person we’ve hired for their expertise, micromanaging can feel like a lack of trust. Robbing them of autonomy can undermine their confidence and productivity. And it keeps us, the business owners, from doing our jobs, whatever those happen to be: the big-picture stuff, wooing new clients, business development, etc.

In reading Leah’s book and talking to her, I was impressed to learn about how she struggled with these same issues – and then methodically figured out a plan to fix them. Her DATA SLEUTH method includes systems for tackling complex cases involving mountains of data, and also for hiring and training new employees and delegating responsibilities for each task.

That’s impressive. Taking the time to create and implement systems is a hard thing for most business owners to do. Our colleagues Mark and Wendy Murnan are also great at this. They are private investigators and entrepreneurs who’ve built a process for hiring employees and contractors that clarifies the Murnans’ expectations and preferred ways of doing things. They’ve written this process down, so it’s easy to replicate.

Keeping up with the growth of a small business is like dealing with a leaky roof: The thing only leaks when it’s raining. When it’s sunny, we sometimes forget to worry about it. For us at Storyboard, the rain came with that regulatory change last winter. We needed that rain. But it also made for lots of leaks between December and April, and there was no time to fix them as the storm pounded down.

Now that the downpour has abated, we’re working to not just patch the roof, but perhaps to replace it before the next storm comes.

That’s what continuing education is all about: taking the time when things are slow(er) to troubleshoot system failures and prepare our businesses for the Next Big Thing — which could be a feast or a famine. —THH

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