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The Complete Online Course in Personal Property Appraising

Final Assignment: Sample Appraisal

Your final assignment is the submission for review of a sample appraisal report making use of the Appraisal Report option.

1. Appraise one item of personal property of your choice having a fair market value in excess of $5000 and that you hypothetically inspected. In other words, you do not need to personally inspect the item. Just pretend you did, if need be. We want to assume you are personally inspecting the property as opposed to doing an appraisal "at distance". The property you appraise can be something you own. Or something in a museum or historical society. Or an item you saw on the Internet or in an auction catalog. Pretend you personally inspected the item, though, even though you might not have.

2. Prepare an appraisal report using USPAP's Appraisal Report option for the intended use of non-cash charitable contribution making use of MS Word.

3. Include images of the subject property. If you have only one image of the item and, in practice, you would have included more in your appraisal (such as images of all sides and the bottom), then simply state that you would have included more images.

4. Be sure to include the comparables on which you based your opinion of value. See #10 below.

5. If you wish (and I suggest you do), make use of the sample appraisal report in Appendix L of the course book and of sample wording found in other places throughout the text book (particularly in Chapter 11). For students of this course, use of the text book material is not a copyright infringement.

6. Be sure that your appraisal complies with the Chapter 11 section entitled "Required Content When Using "Appraisal Report" Option."

7. Ensure all pages are paginated in the "Page X or Y" format.

8. Ensure all pages (except page 1 which should be your company letterhead) have a header containing the name of client, date and pagination. If you prefer to use footers instead of headers, some of this information can be placed in the footer if you would rather do so. (You will need to learn how to make use of page headers and footers if you do not already know how. If need be, go to YouTube.com and search for "using headers and footers" or something similar to locate helpful videos.)

9. Regarding citations and declarations, review this new information: http://www.appraisalcourseassociates.com/2014/02/04/citations-and-declarations-for-the-donation-appraisal/

10. Be sure to identify the item as well as the comparables in accordance with this IRS Guidance. You will find this resource in Appendix BB of your course book. I know this Guidance is for items in excess of $50,000. Regardless, it is good, sound advice even for items valued between $5K and $50K. Especially the last paragraph which emphasizes stating your reasoning!

11. Send the initial draft in MS Word format as a .doc file to info@appraisalcourseassociates.com for initial review and comments. We will bounce it back and forth.

12. Once all final edits are made, mail final version to:

Appraisal Course Associates
1612 Shookstown Rd.
Frederick, MD 21702

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