What is BRAVE? The 99-field appraisal data standard explained

BRAVE, the Banking Real-Estate-Appraisal Valuation Exchange, is an open 99-field data standard for commercial real estate appraisals. It defines a single machine-readable dataset, delivered as an XLSX workbook alongside the appraisal PDF, so that banks receive the key facts and figures of every commercial appraisal in one consistent, structured format. The standard was released in March 2026 and is already required by banks such as Bank OZK and SouthState.

Who created BRAVE?

BRAVE was created by chief appraisers from three banks working together with Valcre, an appraisal software provider:

• Jeff Garvin, Bank OZK
• Thomas Boyle, U.S. Bank
• Elaine Liz-Plowman, Hancock Whitney

The standard is endorsed by the Appraisal Institute and is deliberately vendor-neutral: it is governed by a technical committee of banks and appraisers rather than any single software company. The official specification and validator live at usebrave.org.

What problem does BRAVE solve?

Commercial appraisal reports are delivered as long PDFs, and the data a bank actually needs, such as the concluded values, capitalization rates, income figures, and property facts, is locked inside them. Before BRAVE, every institution re-keyed those numbers by hand into its own credit and risk systems, in its own internal format. That meant duplicated effort across the industry, transcription errors, and no way to compare or aggregate appraisal data consistently.

BRAVE replaces that with one shared definition of the 99 fields a bank needs from a commercial appraisal. Appraisers deliver the same structured workbook to every adopting lender, and lenders can load it directly into their systems instead of re-keying from the PDF.

Which banks require BRAVE?

Banks including Bank OZK and SouthState now require the BRAVE XLSX alongside the PDF report, and over 300 appraisal firms are already delivering it. Because the standard was written by bank chief appraisers and endorsed by the Appraisal Institute, adoption is spreading through lender requirements: when a bank adds BRAVE to its engagement letters, every appraisal firm on its panel needs a way to produce the deliverable.

BRAVE applies to commercial appraisals only. There is no residential equivalent; the residential world is moving to structured data through UAD 3.6 instead. See our guide UAD 3.6: what changes and when.

The XLSX deliverable

The BRAVE deliverable is an Excel workbook that carries the 99 standardized fields in a defined layout. It travels with the appraisal PDF as a second file: the PDF remains the appraisal report of record, and the XLSX is the structured data extract of it. The official validator at usebrave.org checks a workbook against the standard, so both appraisers and lenders can confirm a deliverable conforms before it is submitted or ingested.

How the BRAVE XLSX gets produced

There are two ways a BRAVE workbook comes into existence:

1. Manual entry. The appraiser or an analyst re-keys the 99 fields from the finished report into the workbook. This works, but it adds time to every assignment and reintroduces the transcription risk the standard was meant to remove: a typo in the XLSX now disagrees with the PDF of record.
2. Automated extraction. Software reads the finished appraisal PDF and fills the workbook from it. This keeps the report as the single source of truth and makes the XLSX a derived artifact rather than a second data-entry job.

Appraisal-AI takes the second approach: it extracts the BRAVE dataset automatically from any commercial appraisal PDF and generates the required XLSX deliverable. The same platform runs an AI review of the report with page-cited findings and deterministic cross-checks, so the figures that land in the workbook are verified against the financial tables extracted from the report, with a human reviewer approving the result before delivery.