As an appraiser, I've lost count of the number of times I've felt like I was trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. You know the feeling: you're looking at a site condominium, a property with two ADUs, or a manufactured home in a co-op, and you're stuck trying to decide which legacy form is the "least wrong" choice.

The good news is that this frustration is one of the key problems being addressed by UAD 3.6 and the redesigned URAR. The new system is built to handle complexity, shifting our focus from rigid forms to specific, factual characteristics of the property itself.

Moving Beyond the Form: A Data-First Approach

The most fundamental change is the retirement of familiar form numbers. Instead of selecting a form like a 1004 or 1073, the new URAR will be dynamically generated based on a set of data points that describe the property.

This shift is the very foundation that allows the new URAR to be flexible. We provide the discrete data, and the report assembles itself to reflect the property's unique reality.

Site Condominiums (Detached Condos)

This has always been a classic headache. With the new UAD 3.6, we can accurately represent a site condo by combining:

  • Project Legal Structure: Condominium
  • Construction Method: Site Built
  • Attachment Type: Detached
  • Subject Site Owned in Common: No

This combination was impossible to convey on a single legacy form.

Complex Manufactured Homes

The new URAR provides clarity for various manufactured housing scenarios:

  • A manufactured home in a cooperative: Construction Method: Manufactured and Project Legal Structure: Cooperative
  • A manufactured home with more than one living unit: Using the Units Excluding ADUs data point

Properties with More Than One ADU

With zoning changes sweeping the country, properties with multiple ADUs are becoming more common. The new URAR directly addresses this with the AccessoryDwellingUnitTotalCount data point.

What This Means for Your Practice

The new system brings a level of precision and nuance that simply wasn't possible before. Instead of choosing the "least wrong" form and writing lengthy addenda, you can now let the property's data speak for itself. This is a significant improvement that should reduce revision requests and improve the overall quality and consistency of our reports.