BOOK REVIEW: "Appraising Personal Property: Principles and Methodology - 3rd Ed." A thorough and insightful review by Stephen P. Sweeting, ASA, MRICS
of Dave Maloney's 3rd edition of "Appraising Personal Property: Principles and Methodology".
News-Antique.com - Jan 12,2010 - As professional personal property appraisers most of us are interested in quality publications on the theory and practice of valuation as well as on the business of appraising. Unfortunately, given the small size of our discipline within the valuation community, new and relevant publications are few and far between. Unlike the larger and more fully capitalized real property, business, and technical sectors of the valuation community, we often have to rely on outdated publications or course-related handouts produced on a relatively small scale. The result is that our profession does not have of a particularly large body of literature.
One of the few bright spots in the personal property valuation publications sphere is Maryland’s David J. Maloney, Jr., an appraiser, educator and writer who has committed to follow-up editions of “ a course book and reference guide” originally published in 2007. The recent publication of the third edition takes the excellent format developed in the first two editions and grows it into an outstanding resource and learning tool for all personal property appraisers.
I first ran one of the earlier editions of Appraising Personal Property: Principles and Methodologies less that a year ago when our office borrowed a colleague’s copy. I leafed through the book and saw much of interest, finding it to be comprehensive, logically organized, and well written. But as we were busy at the time the volume ended up in one of those ubiquitous piles of books and journals that characterize the offices of all busy appraisers.
A few weeks later I started working my way through an extraordinarily complex loss-of-value appraisal report involving a high six-figure value work by a pivotal mid-twentieth century American artist. Although I have done plenty of loss-of-value work in the past, I wanted to ground my efforts in as much relevant literature as possible and went back to the volume sitting in my office. What I found was perhaps the most thorough and practical articulation of the loss-of-value concept I had ever seen. As I worked through my appraisal report, the relevant sections on loss-of-value in Appraising Personal Property et. al. served as both a conceptual template and a road map for handling the project.
After finishing my report, I went through Appraising Personal Property more closely. Using the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice (USPAP) as its foundation, and integrating theory and praxis, the volume covered appraisal terminology, appraisal principles, USPAP, ethics, property description, research techniques, and appraisal report-writing with considerable depth. The fully indexed book finished off with a highly relevant section on business practices and a number of useful document examples and templates. I concluded that it was very probably the most thorough book on appraising personal property available in the marketplace today. Moreover, because the volume was built around USPAP, it did not get bogged down in the competing terminologies used by various appraisal societies in their education programs. The book was relevant to all personal property appraisers using USPAP as their practice guideline.
