Terms of Service

1. Accepting these terms

By creating an account or using Carat, you agree to these terms and to our Privacy Policy. If you use Carat for a firm, you confirm you can bind that firm, and "you" includes it.

2. Who can use Carat

Carat is for real estate appraisers, appraiser trainees working under a supervisor, and the staff of appraisal firms. You must be at least 18 and able to enter a binding contract.

3. Your report, your responsibility

Carat is software. It is not an appraiser, an appraisal management company or a lender, and it does not perform appraisals.

• You are the appraiser of record. The opinions of value, adjustments, analysis and certifications in every report are yours. You are responsible for compliance with USPAP, your state licensing rules, and the requirements of your clients, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, FHA, VA, USDA and anyone else who relies on the report.
• Review before you sign. Values that Carat fills in, looks up or calculates (public records, maps, areas, adjustment medians from your past reports) are aids. Check them before you rely on them.
• Readiness checks are not approval. Passing Carat's checks against the MISMO schema and GSE rules does not mean a report will be accepted by UCDP, a lender or an AMC, or that it is free of errors.
• You deliver. Carat never signs, submits or delivers a report for you.

4. Accounts and organizations

Keep your sign-in details secure and tell us at support@carat.homes if you think your account has been misused. Each person needs their own account. Organization owners and admins control who can see, assign, transfer and archive the organization's reports.

5. Subscription and billing

Carat is offered as a monthly subscription, currently $99 a month for each member who can sign reports (owners, admins and staff appraisers) and $29 a month for each trainee, with unlimited reports. Archived members are not billed. When billing is enabled, your subscription renews each month until you cancel. You can cancel at any time; it ends at the close of the period you have paid for, and we do not give refunds for part months unless the law requires it. We will give at least 30 days' notice of any price change, and it applies from your next renewal after that.

6. Your data

You own your reports, photos, comparables and everything else you put into Carat. You give us permission to store and process it only to run the service for you, as described in the Privacy Policy. You confirm you have the right to upload what you upload, including client information and photographs.

You can export your reports at any time. After you close your account you have 90 days to export before we delete your data.

Directory profile. If you set up a directory profile and accept its sharing agreement, you allow us to show that profile (never your private fee range) to AMCs, lenders and other ordering clients using the Carat directory or a connected order integration, and you allow them to contact you and send order requests about assignments. Listing never obliges you to accept an order; each engagement is between you and the client. You keep the profile accurate, and you can withdraw at any time in Settings. The agreement shown in Settings, and its version and acceptance date, form part of these terms.

7. Acceptable use

Do not:

• use Carat to produce a misleading or fraudulent report, or to impersonate another appraiser or use their license or signature without permission;
• upload information you have no right to share;
• try to get into accounts or data that are not yours, or test, probe or overload our systems;
• copy, resell or reverse-engineer the software, or scrape it to build a competing product (section 9 has the details).

8. Standards and third-party data

Carat follows published specifications such as UAD 3.6, MISMO 3.6 and ANSI Z765, and draws on public records and map services. These change, and they can contain errors. We work to keep up with specification updates, but we do not guarantee that third-party data is complete or correct, or that the service will always match the latest published version.

9. Our software

Carat, including its software, design, rules, data models, report templates, documentation and content, belongs to Rawi Studios and is protected by copyright, trade secret and other laws. While your account is in good standing, we give you a limited, personal, non-exclusive, non-transferable and revocable right to use it for your own appraisal work. We keep every right we do not expressly give you.

You may not, and may not help or allow anyone else to:

• copy, modify, translate or make derivative works of Carat, including its screens, workflows, rules or report templates;
• decompile, disassemble or reverse-engineer it, or try to work out its source code, rules or data models, except where the law allows this despite this restriction;
• use bots, scrapers or other automated means to access it, other than the exports and integrations we provide;
• use Carat, or anything learned from it, to build, train or benchmark a competing product or service, or publish comparisons of its performance without our written permission;
• share your sign-in, resell or sublicense access, or let anyone outside your organization use your account;
• remove or hide our copyright, trademark or other notices.

Features you see before we announce them, and anything we mark confidential, are our confidential information; please keep them to yourself. Suggestions you send us may be used to improve Carat without obligation to you. Carat and its logo are trademarks of Rawi Studios.

10. Disclaimers

Carat is provided "as is" and "as available". To the fullest extent the law allows, we disclaim all warranties, express or implied, including merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement, and we do not promise the service will be uninterrupted or error-free.

11. Limitation of liability

To the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for indirect, incidental, special, consequential or punitive damages, or for lost profits, fees, data or business, including claims arising from an appraisal prepared with Carat. Our total liability for any claim is limited to the amount you paid us in the 12 months before the claim arose.

12. Indemnification

You agree to defend and indemnify Rawi Studios against claims by third parties (including clients, lenders, borrowers and regulators) arising from your reports, your appraisal work or your breach of these terms.

13. Ending your account

You can close your account at any time. We may suspend or close an account that breaks these terms or puts other users or our systems at risk; where we can, we will warn you first and give you a chance to export your data.

14. Governing law and disputes

These terms are governed by the laws of the State of New Jersey. Before filing any claim, contact us at support@carat.homes and give us 60 days to try to resolve it informally. Any dispute that remains will be resolved by binding individual arbitration under the American Arbitration Association's rules, in New Jersey or the county where you work, except that either side may bring a claim in small claims court, and either side may ask a court for an injunction or other equitable relief to stop the infringement or misuse of its intellectual property or confidential information, including any breach of section 9. You and we each waive the right to a jury trial and to take part in a class action.

15. Changes

We may update these terms. For material changes we will email account holders at least 30 days before they take effect; continuing to use Carat after that means you accept them.

16. Contact

Rawi Studios · support@carat.homes · rawistudios.com