How home valuation tools work
Form 1004 Expires in November
6 min read
On 2 November 2026, every appraisal on a loan sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac must use UAD 3.6. Fannie Form 1004 and Freddie Form 70, the report that has anchored residential valuation for close to twenty years, stops being accepted. Freddie Mac began attaching a warning message to legacy submissions on 6 August, and any UAD 2.6 appraisal still in the pipeline has to reach the Uniform Collateral Data Portal before the deadline or be converted.
Broad production opened on 26 January, so the change has been available all year and optional all year. Eleven weeks from now it stops being optional.
What replaces the 1004 is not another form
The new Uniform Residential Appraisal Report is a single dynamic document that expands and contracts according to the property type and the inspection performed. One report covers everything the legacy stack of separate forms used to cover. It is built on MISMO v3.6, and it is delivered to the UCDP as a package containing an XML data file, a human-readable PDF, and a folder of property images.
Read that delivery format again, because it carries the change. The PDF is one of three things in the envelope and the one described as human-readable, which tells you what the other two are for. The appraisal is now a data submission that includes a document, rather than a document that gets machine-parsed.
The appraiser gains fields and loses the blank space
The new dataset is far more granular. Room-level condition ratings, energy efficiency features and disaster mitigation improvements become first-class fields rather than things an appraiser mentions in passing. For anyone who has argued that a valuation should record what is specifically true about a house, this is the industry agreeing.
The cost sits on the other side of the same change. Free-form commentary, which lived in addenda, is being converted into structured fields, dropdowns and checkboxes, and addendum dependency is being reduced by design. The stated goals are fewer gray areas, higher first-submission quality and fewer revision requests, which a lender reviewing thousands of files is right to want.
But a field can only record what somebody anticipated. A 1962 ranch taken to the studs in 2023 with permits, an invoice and a transferable warranty becomes a condition rating and a set of checkboxes. The rating may well be the correct one. The reasoning that makes it defensible has a smaller place to live, and there is no dropdown for the thing nobody thought to build a dropdown for. Structured data is better at being audited and worse at being argued with.
The appraisal becomes a record while the CMA stays a document
Here is what an operator should take from the mandate, and it is not about appraisers. Two instruments describe the same house and both claim to establish what it is worth. One of them is being standardised on a federal timetable because a secondary market needs to compare millions of them against each other. The other is not being standardised at all, and there is no timetable, no dataset and no portal, because nobody buys a comparative market analysis in bulk. As of November they are formally different kinds of object. The appraisal is a record. The taxonomy of instruments that treats both as documents establishing value stops describing the situation accurately on that date.
The consequence in front of a seller is that the two now read differently. The appraisal arrives structured and comparable, and its format signals that its judgments were constrained. The CMA arrives as prose, which is the only remaining place an argument about a specific house can be made at length. That is either its weakness or the last thing it has, depending on whether the argument is any good.
| Date | What happens |
|---|---|
| 8 September 2025 | Limited Production Period opens, by application only |
| 26 January 2026 | Broad Production opens, all lenders may submit UAD 3.6 |
| Spring 2026 | FHA begins its own transition, per FHA Info 2025-42 |
| 5 May 2026 | GSEs republish the timeline and FAQs to remove outdated guidance |
| 6 August 2026 | Warning message attached to UAD 2.6 submissions |
| 2 November 2026 | UAD 3.6 mandatory for all new submissions on GSE loans |
Source: Fannie Mae Uniform Appraisal Dataset page and Freddie Mac UAD redesign timeline, current August 2026. Policy detail in Fannie Mae's June Selling Guide supplement and Freddie Mac Bulletin 2025-7.
When does UAD 3.6 become mandatory for appraisals?
2 November 2026, for all new appraisal submissions on loans sold to Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac. Since 26 January both versions have been accepted, and legacy appraisals still in progress must reach the UCDP before the deadline or be converted. FHA began its own transition in spring 2026.
What replaces the 1004 appraisal form?
A single dynamic Uniform Residential Appraisal Report that adapts to the property type and the inspection performed, replacing the legacy forms including Fannie Form 1004 and Freddie Form 70. It is built on MISMO v3.6 and submitted as a package of XML data, a PDF and property images rather than as a completed form.
Does UAD 3.6 change what an appraiser can write about a property?
It changes where the writing goes. Commentary that sat in a free-form addendum moves into defined sections and structured fields. The dataset is more granular, including room-level condition ratings and energy features, so more of what an appraiser observes is captured as data and less as explanation.
What we are betting on, stated plainly
The mandate is a good thing badly suited to one job. Comparability across a national loan portfolio improves when every report carries the same fields, and a checkbox is more checkable than a paragraph.
Worth naming that CMAflow builds on the side of this divide nobody is standardising. Our report is a document with structured inputs rather than a database record, and that is a wager rather than a feature: that the argument for a price still needs somewhere to live, and that the need grows as the appraisal stops carrying one. This is Context Blindness™ arriving through the front door with a compliance deadline attached, because a form capturing more about a house than any before it still has no field for the reason. Whether the reason matters to a seller in November is not ours to decide.
This article is general information and analysis, not financial, lending, or appraisal advice. Verify any home value with a licensed professional before acting.
The Independent Agent
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