The numbers don’t lie, and right now they’re telling a story that every mortgage lender, credit union, and portfolio lender in the country needs to hear.

According to Working RE’s 2026 State of the Profession Survey, completed by approximately 1,800 appraisers nationwide, only 3% of respondents had completed an appraisal using the new UAD 3.6 format as of March 2026. Meanwhile, 58% of appraisers had not yet taken the mandatory 7-hour training course developed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to prepare for the transition. The mandatory compliance deadline is November 2, 2026. That’s less than six months away.

Let that sink in for a moment. Nearly six out of ten appraisers are approaching one of the most significant form changes in decades with no training and zero hands-on experience. And nearly a quarter of the profession — 22% of survey respondents — admitted they don’t yet know enough about UAD 3.6 to even identify their concerns. For lenders who depend on appraisal turnaround to close loans, this isn’t a hypothetical risk. It’s a pipeline problem that’s already taking shape.

What UAD 3.6 Actually Demands

UAD 3.6 isn’t a cosmetic update to the 1004 form. It’s a genuine workflow overhaul. The new Uniform Residential Appraisal Report requires appraisers to rate interior and exterior quality separately, document appliance functionality, and provide more detailed, field-specific updates than anything the legacy form required. More fields, more structured property description requirements, and more points of potential inconsistency.

The appraiser community knows this. In the Working RE survey, 40.87% of respondents cited “more work” as their primary concern about UAD 3.6. That concern is directly shaping fee expectations — 64.29% of appraisers say they plan to increase their fees for UAD 3.6 assignments. Only 2.62% say they won’t.

For lenders, this combination of an undertrained appraiser panel, a complex new form, and rising fees, creates real pressure on loan cycle times and appraisal budgets. The question isn’t whether the transition will be bumpy. It’s how well your AMC has prepared for it.

Why Most AMCs Aren’t Ready

The structural problem for most appraisal management companies is the same one facing lenders: their panels are trained to the current form, not the new one. UAD 3.6 requires appraisers to build new habits and new ways of observing properties in the field, new ways of documenting what they find, and new ways of reconciling data in software that’s still being updated to accommodate the form change.

Appraisers who don’t adapt quickly will produce reports that fail QC, either because required fields are incomplete, because the new condition and quality rating methodology isn’t applied correctly, or because the data doesn’t reconcile across sections the way the GSE algorithms expect. Every failed QC review is a delay. Every delay is a borrower relationship at risk.

What MTS Has Done About It

MTS Group has spent the last 18 months preparing for UAD 3.6, and that preparation shows up in three specific ways.

First, we’ve been tracking UAD 3.6 readiness at the appraiser level across our national panel. That means we know which appraisers in which markets have completed training, which have hands-on experience with the new form, and which aren’t ready yet. When you send an order through MTS, it’s routed to a qualified appraiser, not just the closest available one.

Second, we’ve updated our quality control process to reflect the new form’s requirements. Our QC team isn’t checking a UAD 3.6 report against legacy standards. We’ve built the new checklist, and our reviewers know what the GSEs are looking for in the new format.

Third, we’ve been having the fee conversation with clients in advance. We’re not going to absorb a surprise fee increase in November and pass it through without warning. Our clients know what UAD 3.6 is likely to cost, and we’re working with them now to adjust product mix and appraisal cascades to manage that cost before the deadline hits.

What This Means for Your Institution

If you’re a lender who hasn’t started the UAD 3.6 conversation with your AMC, now is the time. Six months sounds like a long runway until you factor in loan cycle times, existing pipelines, and the reality that November will arrive at the same time as whatever the rate environment does to volume.

The right questions to ask your AMC: What percentage of your panel has completed the mandatory training? Have you updated your QC process for the new form? What are you projecting for fee increases, and how will you communicate those to us before they hit?

If you don’t like the answers, MTS Group is ready to have a different conversation. We’ve been building for this transition, and we’re prepared to show lenders what readiness actually looks like.

Reach out to MTS Group to talk through your UAD 3.6 readiness and what a coverage strategy looks like for your specific footprint and loan volume.

MTS Group is a national AMC and title management company providing appraisal services in all 50 states and insured title and closings in 17 states.

The Appraiser Workforce Is Aging Out — Here’s What That Means for Your Loan Pipeline

The appraisal profession has a workforce problem that’s been building for nearly two decades, and 2026 may be the year lenders can no longer afford to ignore it.

According to Working RE’s 2026 State of the Profession Survey, one of the most comprehensive looks at the appraiser workforce published this year, roughly 57% of active appraisers are over 60 years old. Less than 2% of survey respondents are between 25 and 39. More than 43% have been appraising for 31 years or more. And nearly one-third of all practicing appraisers plan to leave the profession within three years.

That’s not a distant problem. That’s your appraisal coverage map right now.

The Pipeline Has Already Collapsed

The headline retirement numbers get the most attention, but the more sobering figure comes from the Collateral Risk Network, whose research was cited in the Working RE survey. Since 2009, the number of first-time appraiser test takers has fallen from 4,790 to 1,421 in 2025. Of those, only 820 passed.  That’s roughly 15 new appraisers per state. The Licensed Residential exam, the entry point for most new appraisers, saw test taker volume drop 62% between 2022 and 2025 alone.

The experienced appraisers who are currently handling most of the nation’s residential mortgage work have no meaningful succession. When they retire, and the survey data suggests many of them want to, there is no younger cohort behind them ready to absorb that volume.

What Happens When Rates Drop

Most market observers expect mortgage volume to increase meaningfully over the next 12 to 24 months as rates decline. For lenders, that’s good news. For an appraisal market operating with a shrinking, aging workforce and a backlog of UAD 3.6 training to complete, a volume surge is the worst possible timing.

The dynamics play out the same way every time: as volume increases, appraisers become selective about which orders they accept. Rural and secondary markets see the slowdown first. Turnaround times extend across the board. Fees climb. Lenders who don’t have panel depth, or an AMC with national reach, start missing rate lock expirations and losing purchase deals.

That scenario isn’t theoretical. It’s exactly what happened in 2020 and 2021, and the workforce is measurably thinner now than it was then.

Geographic Exposure Is the Risk Lenders Underestimate

When lenders think about appraisal risk, they typically think about it as a QC issue.  Are reports coming back clean? But the more pressing strategic risk for most institutions is geographic coverage: in which markets will you be unable to close loans in a timely way when volume picks up?

The Working RE survey data suggests the problem is concentrated but widespread. Rural markets in the Southeast, Midwest, and Mountain West are the most exposed and states where the appraiser population was already thin and where the age skew is even more pronounced than the national average. But the problem isn’t limited to rural markets. Many suburban markets that saw appraiser populations shrink after 2008 and never fully recover are quietly becoming coverage concerns as well.

For credit unions and community banks with concentrated geographic footprints, this is existential. If your primary lending market is a mid-sized metro that doesn’t have a deep appraiser bench, your ability to close purchase and refinance loans in a rate environment that drives volume is directly tied to your AMC’s ability to staff those markets.

How MTS Group Addresses the Coverage Problem

MTS Group was built exactly for this environment. As a national AMC providing appraisal services in all 50 states, our panel development has always prioritized depth and geographic redundancy over the convenience of concentrating on the easiest markets.

That means a few specific things for our lender clients. First, we maintain active appraiser relationships in markets where the workforce is thin.  These relationships take years to build and that a transactional AMC doesn’t invest in. When volume spikes, we have appraisers available in markets where other AMCs are scrambling.

Second, we’ve invested in alternative valuation products that help lenders manage the coverage problem in markets where traditional appraisal availability is genuinely constrained. Not every loan needs a full URAR. For HELOC decisions, home equity lending, and portfolio monitoring, MTS offers AVM solutions and property report products that reduce cycle time and cost without sacrificing the data quality underwriting requires.

Third, for lenders who are thinking about expanding into new markets, which is something that becomes attractive as rates fall and competition for borrowers intensifies, we can provide an honest assessment of appraisal coverage in your target markets before you build out a lending strategy there. It’s easier to design around a coverage gap than to discover one mid-pipeline.

What Lenders Should Be Planning For

The workforce data in the 2026 Working RE survey isn’t a reason to panic. But it is a reason to plan. The institutions that will be best positioned when the next volume cycle arrives are the ones that have built vendor relationships that can scale with them, not just in the easy markets, but everywhere they lend.

MTS Group is that partner. We’ve been building for this environment, and we’re ready to talk through what your coverage strategy should look like for the next 12 to 24 months – before the next rate move makes it urgent.

Reach out to MTS Group to discuss your geographic footprint and how we structure coverage for markets where the appraiser workforce is thinnest.

MTS Group is a national AMC and title management company providing appraisal services in all 50 states and insured title and closings in 17 states.

Hybrids, AI, and the Future of Valuation: What the 2026 Appraiser Survey Tells Lenders About What’s Coming

There’s a gap forming in the residential lending market, and it’s not between borrowers and rates. It’s between the valuation products lenders need to stay competitive and the appraisal profession’s willingness to deliver them.

Working RE’s 2026 State of the Profession Survey, completed by approximately 1,800 appraisers across the country, puts hard numbers to what many lenders have been sensing in the market. The profession is older, more experienced, and more resistant to change than it’s ever been. But the lending market is moving forward regardless. Understanding that gap and building a strategy around it is one of the most important things a lender can do right now.

The Hybrid Resistance Is Structural, Not Generational

Of all the findings in the 2026 Working RE survey, the hybrid appraisal data may be the most relevant for lenders thinking about valuation strategy. Here’s what the survey found: 67.30% of respondents have never done a hybrid appraisal assignment. Another 15% did hybrid work only during the COVID-19 pandemic, a period of necessity, not preference. Only 17.69% have adopted hybrid work as a regular practice. And looking forward, 65.48% say they are not open to doing hybrid assignments in the future.

The reasons appraisers give for avoiding hybrids aren’t rooted in unfamiliarity with technology. They are professional objections: liability concerns about data collected by a third party, the difficulty of appraising a property you haven’t physically inspected, and geographic competency concerns. These are legitimate concerns, and they’re not going away.

What this means for lenders is that you can’t assume your AMC has meaningful hybrid capacity. You need to ask specifically how many of your panel appraisers are currently doing hybrid assignments? What’s your hybrid acceptance rate by market? What’s the typical turn time for hybrid versus traditional?

AI: Adoption Is Real, but Narrow

The survey data on AI adoption is more nuanced than the hybrid data, and nuance matters for lenders. Overall, 57.92% of appraisers report using AI in some form, a majority and a meaningful shift from where the profession was two years ago. But what they’re using AI for tells a more cautious story.

The dominant use cases are writing and report drafting (40.18%) and research tasks like market condition analysis (37.59%). The more analytically demanding applications, automated comparable selection, valuation modeling, show much lower adoption. And 42.08% of survey respondents are not using AI at all.

What this tells lenders is that AI is beginning to improve appraiser productivity at the margins, but it’s not yet transforming how valuations are being developed at the core. The appraiser is still making the analytical judgments that matter. Technology is helping them write up those judgments more efficiently.

That’s useful context for lenders who are evaluating whether AI-enabled AMC tools will solve their coverage and turn-time problems. Although they might improve them, they are not going to eliminate them.

The Valuation Cascade Lenders Actually Need

The picture that emerges from the 2026 survey data is a profession in transition which gradually is adopting technology, sharply resistant to product innovation, and operating with a workforce that’s contracting faster than it’s being replaced. For lenders, that transition creates a clear strategic imperative: build a valuation cascade that doesn’t depend on the traditional appraisal as your only solution.

That cascade looks different for different loan types and risk profiles. For purchase transactions and complex assignments, a traditional full appraisal remains the appropriate product. For HELOC decisions at lower LTV thresholds, a desktop or hybrid product, where the GSE guidelines permit, can dramatically reduce cost and turn time without introducing meaningful additional risk. For portfolio monitoring and AVM validation, a property data report can deliver the data you need at a fraction of the cost of a full appraisal.

The lenders who build that cascade and who match the valuation product to the transaction rather than defaulting to one-size-fits-all, are the ones who will maintain competitive turnaround times and cost structures as the market changes.

How MTS Group Builds the Cascade With You

MTS Group’s approach to valuation strategy is built around exactly this kind of product flexibility. We’re a full-service AMC and title management company, and that means we can deliver across the entire cascade, not just the traditional appraisal segment.

Traditional Appraisals: For complex assignments, purchase transactions, and anything requiring the full weight of a licensed appraisal, we deliver consistently across all 50 states.

Hybrid and Bifurcated Products: We’ve cultivated the subset of our appraiser panel that is experienced and willing to execute hybrid assignments credibly. Rather than asking a reluctant appraiser to do work they don’t trust, we route hybrid orders to practitioners who have built workflows around this product type.

AVMs and Property Data Reports: For HELOC decisions, portfolio monitoring, and lower-LTV transactions where investor guidelines permit alternatives, MTS offers AVM and property report solutions that reduce cost and turn time without sacrificing data quality.

Title and Closing Services: Our full-service offering extends to insured title and closings in 17 states, meaning lenders can consolidate vendor relationships and streamline back-office coordination that eats into cycle time.

Valuation Strategy Is a Competitive Differentiator

The lenders who navigate the coming transition best won’t be the ones who wait for the profession to sort itself out. They’ll be the ones who partner with an AMC that understands the landscape, has built for it, and can deliver consistent results across product types, geographies, and market conditions.

MTS Group has been that partner for lenders across the country, and we’re actively looking to expand those relationships as the market heads into the next rate cycle. If you’re thinking through your valuation strategy for the next 12 to 24 months, particularly if HELOC volume, home equity lending, or geographic expansion is part of your plan, we’d like to have that conversation.

Reach out to MTS Group to discuss how a diversified valuation cascade could improve your loan cycle times, reduce vendor dependency risk, and position your institution for the volume environment that’s coming.

MTS Group is a national AMC and title management company providing appraisal services in all 50 states and insured title and closings in 17 states.