Current appraiser trainee requirements involve principles, practices, and standards. Unfortunately, trainees are being grounded in the old “experience” basis, instead of today’s analytics basis!
USPAP Standard 1-1(a) first sentence says, “The principle of change continues to affect the manner in which appraisers perform appraisal services.” Yet appraiser-training stays stuck in outmoded ways.
Recently, the same quasi-governmental body (The Appraisal Foundation) installed an advisory opinion (AO-41) regarding the use of technology by appraisers (but not by competing valuation services). That opinion similarly states: “The rapid growth of technology in the valuation profession presents both opportunities and challenges.” Yet appraiser-training stays stuck in outmoded ways.
Key proposed trainee-appraiser qualification changes include:
- Eliminate some general education requirements, and all trainee continuing education;
- Reduce education on bias, impartiality, and objective valuation practice;
- Decreasing minimum timeframe, but allowing for other experience;
- Core principles and practices curriculum to stay the same;
All designed to “streamline,” not reduce, competence for entry into the vocation . . .
It may be that stated objectives may not line up. Is today’s trainee different from those of the past? Is today’s valuation process different? Do we have different technology now?
Specifically, is today’s technology about data? Yes it is – not the art of looking at comps.
Is today’s technology about the analysis of that data? Yes it is. With the help of computer power. With the help of visuals (graphs, maps, tables, and interactives). And with the help of artificial intelligence. AI!
AI – a new skill! Graphs! A neglected skill! Similarity measures – an ignored skill. Variation and uncertainty – a needed knowledge of what user/clients really want to know. Not your two-week-old opinion. Risk of loss. Failure to gain. Loss of fairness. Reliability. Not believability. Accuracy, not worthiness.
A stated goal of the 2026 AQB Exposure Draft is to “preserve the core requirements in the Criteria.” The Criteria maintain the validity of traditional principles, traditional practices. Preserve!
The standards claim to be “principles-based,” even as they prescribe three “approaches.” And specifically leave out the market analysis approach. Leave out the very thing that valuation is, or should be. “Appraisal is Market Analysis.” Various forecasting methods are noted, but not considered an alternative approach to value.
And finally, today’s data, computer power, brain-machine interface, and now – AI. AI itself enables workflow efficiencies, “vibe coding,” and directly connecting the expert brain to models, visual feedback, to repeatable algorithms, to user-interactive decision-making.
Public policy around valuation and risk needs to be reflected in today’s training criteria for new appraisers and “non-opinion” “valuation analysts.” Increasingly, we see analysts hired and trained to work-around the limitations of today’s standards, regulations, and embedded habit and outmoded education criteria.
Young aspirees know, and want, — modern computerese, data science, and game theory — and easily understand visual comprehension of markets – not acquiescing to trainers who know and preserve legacy criteria — the core requirements of traditional principles and practice. To get practice on how to pick and compare comps.
Data science is here today, not tomorrow. Updated public policy and criteria is needed now, not tomorrow. The problem is fear, mental set, groupthink, and embedded policy – not technology.