USPAP Standard 3 appraisal review checklist

USPAP, the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice promulgated by The Appraisal Foundation, is the regulatory framework every US appraiser must follow. Standards 1, 2, and 3 govern the development, reporting, and review of appraisals. Standard 3 is the one that applies when an appraiser reviews another appraiser's work: it defines what a credible appraisal review requires. This guide summarizes those obligations and turns them into a practical checklist a review desk can actually run.

What Standard 3 asks of a reviewer

An appraisal review is its own assignment with its own client, and the reviewer develops an independent, supported opinion about the quality of the work under review. Two rules carry most of the weight:

• SR 3-1 sets the reviewer's general obligations: be competent in the property type and methods involved, apply recognized review methods and techniques correctly, and do not render the review in a careless or negligent manner or commit a substantial error that significantly affects the review's conclusions.
• SR 3-2 governs developing the review itself: identify the review problem (the client and intended users of the review, its intended use, and the work under review, including its effective date and the appraiser who produced it), determine an appropriate scope of work, and develop opinions about whether the analyses in the work under review are complete, accurate, adequate, relevant, and reasonable.

Those five quality dimensions, completeness, accuracy, adequacy, relevance, and reasonableness, are the backbone of the checklist below. One more distinction matters before starting: if the reviewer states their own opinion of value rather than only evaluating the appraiser's, that value opinion is itself appraisal development and must meet the appraisal development standard too.

The checklist

1. Set up the review assignment

• Identify the client and intended users of the review itself.
• State the intended use and whether the review includes your own opinion of value.
• Confirm the review's client and intended users separately from the appraisal's. The bank ordering the review is the review's client; the appraisal under review has its own, often different, client and intended users.
• Document the scope of the review and any assignment conditions.

2. Identify the work under review

• Appraiser's name, credential, and signature present.
• Report date and effective date of value identified and consistent.
• Property, property rights appraised, and intended use of the appraisal stated.

3. Completeness

• All applicable approaches to value are developed, or their exclusion is explained.
• USPAP-required certifications and disclosures are present.
• Extraordinary assumptions and hypothetical conditions are disclosed and their effect on value is stated.
• Engagement requirements (scope, deliverables, client conditions) are met.

4. Accuracy

• The math holds: adjustment grids foot, income and expense figures reconcile to the capitalization or discounting applied, and per-unit values agree with totals.
• Figures are consistent across the report: the same square footage, dates, and values wherever they repeat.
• Data is verifiable: sales, rents, and costs trace to identifiable sources.

5. Adequacy and relevance

• Comparable selection is relevant to the subject and the market.
• The methodology fits the property type and the appraisal problem.
• Market analysis actually supports the conclusions drawn from it.

6. Reasonableness

• The reconciliation follows from the analyses rather than overriding them.
• The value conclusion is supported by the evidence in the report.
• Conclusions the report withholds support for are flagged, not assumed correct.

7. Compliance and language

• The work under review complies with USPAP and applicable assignment conditions.
• The report contains no language that may violate the Fair Housing Act, such as references to neighborhood demographics or steering language.

8. The reviewer's own obligations

• Your competency for the property type and market is established or disclosed.
• Your review conclusions are supported with evidence you can point to.
• Your certification is signed and your workfile supports the review.

Running the checklist at scale

Most of the checklist is judgment, but a large share of it is verifiable mechanical work: footing grids, tracing repeated figures, confirming required disclosures exist. That is the part Appraisal-AI automates. The platform reads the full report, drafts page-cited findings against USPAP Standards 1, 2, and 3, re-verifies figures, dates, and rents with deterministic cross-checks against the extracted financial tables, and screens for Fair Housing Act bias language. A human reviewer approves every finding before delivery, so the reviewer spends their time on the judgment calls, with the evidence (page, table, exact phrasing) already assembled.

Reviewing residential reports under the new GSE format? See UAD 3.6: what changes and when. Delivering commercial data to banks? See What is BRAVE?