How VALORO works

In plain English

What it does

Online estimates mostly know the square footage, the bedroom count and what sold nearby. They do not know that one neighbor redid the kitchen and another sold with the original one. That difference can be the whole story of a price.

VALORO starts from the sales most like your home, reads the visible condition of each one from its listing photos, and shows you which sales your home is really being compared with, and why. The result is a preliminary range and a short list of comparable sales, each with what makes it different from yours.

Where it works

It is built for South Bay homes, with the most recent sales behind it in Redondo Beach and Torrance and nearby cities including Hermosa Beach, Manhattan Beach, Palos Verdes and Lomita. Each city is priced from its own sales, because a Torrance sale says little about a Redondo house. It is a starting point, not a range I would rely on, for homes with few comparable sales: unusual properties, large lots, multi-unit buildings, and homes with features the records do not describe.

What information it uses

Closed sales from the local multiple listing service, using only what was known before each sale closed. Public county records for parcel facts such as lot size and year built. The listing photos of each comparable sale, for condition. If you choose to share photos of your own home, it can read those too. It never uses anything about you personally.

How photos inform condition

Each comparable sale’s listing photos are read for what can be seen: kitchen and bath condition, flooring, finishes, and signs of work needed. That is how a remodeled sale stops being treated like an original one. Photos show only what the photographer chose to show, so the read is a visible-condition estimate, never an inspection.

How comparable sales are chosen

Relevance comes before recency. A sale must be in the same neighborhood area and of the same type, close in size, and on the same side of a dividing line like Pacific Coast Highway where that matters. Within that set, the newest sales come first. A sale with more bedrooms or a bigger lot can still be shown, with the difference stated, rather than quietly adjusted away. Adjustments are kept small and visible; when one looks large, it is questioned rather than trusted.

My review, and my judgment

The range is where the conversation starts. I check every comparable sale myself, take out any that do not belong, and then see your home. Light, layout, view, noise, the street and the work a buyer will see all move a price, and they are why I recommend a price only after a walkthrough.

Limits

What VALORO cannot know

• The inside of your home, until I see it or you share photos.
• Hidden condition: roof, plumbing, electrical, foundation, permits or unpermitted work.
• View, light, noise and how a layout feels.
• Sales that never reached the listing service.
• What buyers will do next month. A range describes recent evidence, not a guarantee.

About accuracy

Every version of VALORO is tested on later sales it never saw, including whole neighborhoods held out of its training, so it cannot simply remember the answer. I do not publish one headline accuracy number, because accuracy depends on the city, the type of home and how many good comparable sales there are. When I share a figure with you, it will say which version, which homes, which dates and how it was measured.

Technical notes

Training and testing are split by date, so each test sale is later than everything the model learned from, and repeated with entire listing-service areas held out. Only information available before a sale closed is used; fields recorded after a sale are excluded. Condition is read from listing photos by an image model into a fixed set of fields, and the same fields are used for every sale. Ranges are built from how far estimates missed on recent held-out sales, not from a rule of thumb. Comparable sales are filtered by area, property type and size before date.

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