1,500 Data Points: What the New Appraisal Report Changes About How Your Home Is Valued

The form that has described American houses to their lenders since 2005, the Uniform Residential Appraisal Report known by its number, 1004, was retired on Monday, November 2, 2026. In its place, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac now require a single report that reshapes itself to the property and records more than 1,500 data points in fields instead of paragraphs.

Nothing about the new report changes what your house is worth. What it changes is what gets written down, how consistently, and how much of the appraiser's reasoning is structured data a computer can read rather than a sentence only a human will. For an owner who has put money into a house, that is the difference between a renovation that lives in a comment box and one that has its own field.

What happened on November 2

The Uniform Appraisal Dataset is the GSEs' specification for what an appraisal has to contain and how it is coded. The version in use until this week, UAD 2.6, worked through a set of fixed forms: the 1004 for a house, the 1073 for a condo, the 1025 for a two- to four-unit property, the 2055 for an exterior-only report, and so on. Version 3.6 replaces all of them, in what the Oklahoma Real Estate Commission's industry alert calls the most substantial overhaul of appraisal reporting since 2011, with what Freddie Mac calls "a single data-driven, flexible, dynamic structure for appraisal reporting." The data describing the property drives the report; there is no form number.

The timeline, from Fannie Mae's appraiser updates and Freddie Mac's UAD page: a limited production period began September 8, 2025, broad production began January 26, 2026, and UAD 3.6 became mandatory for new appraisal reports submitted to the GSEs' collateral portal on November 2, 2026.

One qualification. On September 30, 2026 the GSEs announced a one-time exception for sellers that could not be ready. A lender that requests it and is approved by each GSE it sells to may keep delivering reports in the old format until May 19, 2027. So from this week most appraisals arrive in the new report, and some, for approved lenders, still arrive in the old one into next spring. If you are in a transaction, you can ask which one your file is being written on; the Oklahoma Real Estate Commission's industry alert tells its licensees to ask the appraiser exactly that when the inspection is scheduled.

The retired forms and what they covered, from Freddie Mac's FAQ:

All of it is now one report, and the Condition and Quality ratings, which did not apply to manufactured homes under UAD 2.6, now apply to every residential property type.

What is actually different

Four changes matter to an owner, and all four come from the GSEs' own descriptions.

Condition and quality are rated inside and out, separately. The familiar scales, C1 through C6 for condition and Q1 through Q6 for quality, are unchanged, but Freddie Mac says the definitions were rewritten for clarity and that "Interior and Exterior Condition and Quality Ratings have also been added," so an appraiser can report them separately when the two differ. The old form averaged a renovated kitchen and a tired roof into one number. The new one does not have to.

Updates and condition are recorded by component. The report carries what the FAQ calls component-level Update Status and Condition Status: a room-by-room update status for kitchens and baths, an overall update status for bathrooms and for flooring, and new construction reported as "Fully Updated" rather than "Not Updated." Defects are reported in six sections of the report (site, dwelling exterior, unit interior, outbuilding, vehicle storage and amenities), shown together in the reconciliation, and turned into action items in a new summary section, per Fannie Mae's June 2025 appraiser update.

The comment box is gone. Fannie Mae's update is blunt: the new report "has no large, generic comment fields." It uses check boxes and drop-downs, with narrow comment fields that open only when a condition calls for one; the overview counts 26 of them. There is no general addendum. Photographs and supporting documents sit inside the section they support rather than at the back, per the Oklahoma alert.

More of the house is captured. Accessory dwelling units get their own size, condition, room count and location. Gross living area becomes "above-grade finished area," with below-grade finished area recorded separately. The sales comparison grid, the table where the appraiser lines your house up against recent sales, has more than seventy possible rows and can grow. The Oklahoma alert puts the total at more than 1,500 data points per property, warns that on-site inspections "will take considerably more time," and notes that appraisal fees are changing with them.

Why structured data changes a valuation

The value of a house is the appraiser's opinion, reconciled from comparable sales. The standard does not touch that. What it touches is three things around it.

First, consistency. When condition and updates are coded the same way on every report, the GSEs' automated review tools can compare your appraisal against thousands of others, and against the appraiser's own prior work, far more tightly than they could read prose. An appraiser who rates a kitchen "Updated" has to code when and what; a reviewer can check it against the photographs embedded in the same section.

Second, visibility. A renovation the old form could absorb into one sentence now lands in a field with a status, and a defect lands in a section with an action item. Both directions cut the same way: documented improvements are harder to under-credit, and deferred maintenance is harder to leave out. For a house that has been kept up and can prove it, that is a change in its favor.

Third, the interior and exterior split. Our July ranking of the Cost vs. Value projects made the case that the outside of a house does more at resale than owners expect; the new report is the first standard form that rates the outside on its own line. An owner who put the budget into the exterior will see it recorded as such, and an owner who did the reverse will too.

None of this is a forecast of your number. It is a description of what will be on the page when the number is set.

What this means for your property

If you are buying or refinancing in the next six months, ask early which report format the appraisal will use, and expect the inspection to run longer than it did a year ago. Have the following in a folder before the appraiser arrives: the dates of every kitchen, bath, flooring, roof, mechanical and window update; permits; receipts; and a short list of anything the appraiser cannot see, like a replaced sewer line. The report has a field for each of those now. Hand the appraiser the list; do not narrate the house.

If you have an accessory dwelling unit, gather its size, room count and condition and a photograph of each room. It is reported in detail for the first time, and a detailed field left thin is worse than one filled.

If you are selling in 2027, the buyer's appraisal will be written on the new report. The pre-listing fixes the Realtors in Before You List recommend now have a second payoff: a defect fixed before listing is one that never reaches the summary section.

If you own rentals, the two-to-four-unit form is gone too, and the rent schedule with it; both now live inside the single report. The same documentation rule applies, unit by unit.

If you are a flipper, the exterior rating is the one to watch. A renovation that stops at the front door will now be rated that way, in a field, by the buyer's appraiser.

The rule

Treat the appraisal as a document you help write. The new report has a field for almost everything you have done to the house; the appraiser fills it from what they can see and what you can show. Dates, permits and receipts in a folder are worth more under this standard than under the last one, and they cost nothing.

What the Realtors tell sellers to fix first is in Before You List. The exterior-first pattern the new report now rates on its own line is in The 2025 Renovation ROI Rankings.