BRAVE for ACI Users

ACI's Domain Is Residential

ACI (ACI Sky and ACI Cloud, part of Verisk) is one of the longest-running residential appraisal authoring platforms in the U.S. It produces URAR/1004, UAD-formatted, 1073, 2055, and the rest of the GSE residential library. It is built around the residential workflow — comparable selection, condition rating, GSE-style form rendering.

BRAVE — the Banking Real Estate Appraisal Valuation Exchange — is a commercial-only data standard created by Valcre. It covers 99 fields across commercial real estate property types: office, retail, industrial, multifamily, hospitality, self-storage, special purpose. There is no residential BRAVE form, and ACI does not export BRAVE.

Who Hits This Wall

Most ACI users never need BRAVE. The two groups that do:

1. Mixed-practice firms taking occasional small commercial work — say, a 5+ unit multifamily for a regional bank — where the bank requires BRAVE.
2. Residential-led firms building a commercial subsidiary or hiring a commercial appraiser who needs to deliver BRAVE alongside the PDF.

Three Practical Paths

Path 1: Adopt a commercial platform

Keep ACI for residential. Add Valcre Professional or Enterprise for commercial work — Valcre includes native BRAVE export and is the platform that created the standard. This is the cleanest production setup.

Path 2: Manual XLSX template

For very low commercial volume (a handful of assignments per year), populate the published BRAVE Excel template by hand. Follow the BRAVE Compliance Checklist before delivery and run the file through the BRAVE validator at usebrave.org. Higher error rate but no platform cost.

Path 3: PDF + extraction service

Produce the commercial appraisal in whatever tool you prefer (Word + Excel combination, an old commercial template). Convert the finished PDF to BRAVE using an extraction service like AppraisalAPI. Good for occasional one-off jobs.

Residential-to-Commercial Field Translation

The fields that surprise appraisers moving from ACI's residential workflow to BRAVE's commercial schema:

• Property type and subtype: BRAVE uses categories like Office, Retail (with subtypes like anchored center, strip), Industrial (warehouse, flex, R&D), Multifamily (garden, mid-rise, high-rise). The residential SFR/condo/2-4 unit taxonomy doesn't apply.
• Income approach (16 fields): residential rarely uses income capitalization. Commercial almost always does. PGI, vacancy, EGI, OpEx, NOI, reserves — all required for income-producing commercial property.
• Cap rate, discount rate, terminal cap rate: standard commercial DCF inputs not used in residential.
• Property.GrossBuildingArea vs Property.NetRentableArea: the GBA / NRA distinction is critical for commercial valuation per sq ft analysis. Residential appraisal uses gross living area, which is a different concept.

For property-type-specific BRAVE field guidance, see BRAVE Fields for Multifamily, Office, Retail, or Industrial.

Lender-Side Reviewers on ACI

Some bank review teams use ACI for residential reviews and need to also review commercial BRAVE. ACI does not ingest BRAVE. Most banks pipe BRAVE XLSX into the LOS or risk model directly and review the structured data against the PDF appraisal side-by-side. This matches what Bank OZK — the first bank to require BRAVE — uses.

What Not to Do

Do not attempt to populate the BRAVE Excel template from a residential 1004 PDF. The fields and concepts don't map. The output will fail validation and waste the lender's review time.

Quick Links

• Export BRAVE from Valcre
• BRAVE Excel Template Download
• BRAVE Compliance Checklist
• What Does BRAVE Stand For?