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Value Australia is on the cusp of launching a large-scale pilot program to test its AI-powered property valuation tool.
The platform could bring big changes to the valuation services sector, which generated $710 million in revenue in FY22 alone.
While some automated valuation methods already exist on the market, Value Australia, which is owned by PEXA Group, touts its use of “state-of-the-art data analytics and artificial intelligence to enrich property datasets,” to deliver “highly accurate and consistent results in real time, with evidence-based reporting for every individual residential property”.
Promising that the tool will eventually be available to home buyers and sellers, industry professionals, and governments, the firm celebrated the launch of the pilot program as one step closer to bringing greater transparency to the valuation process.
A statement from PEXA Group noted that the company believes this kind of innovation is “critical,” particularly right now when “interest rates, inflation, and Australia’s strong population growth are worsening the nation’s housing and rental affordability crises”.
As Value Australia chief executive officer Mark Nassif commented, accurate property valuations are key to proper functionality of the property industry.
He also noted that they are “critical to state governments and councils in terms of calculating rates and land taxes”.
“A staggering $70 billion of property taxes and stamp duties are collected in Australia, with valuations also essential for extracting the maximum value out of infrastructure projects and developments through measures such as betterment levies. Much of this money is pumped back into essential services, including vital new housing, yet the process of valuing property carries a huge administrative cost servicing objections and appeals,” he noted.
Mr Nassif said the award-winning technology had been independently validated through a trial by a valuer-general and assessments by a major Australian lender and a leading industry academic.
“We are now ready to launch a large-scale pilot primarily with financial institutions and government partners in the second half of 2023 before releasing more widely in 2024,” he said.
The machine learning technology behind the tool is the result of five years of research and development collaboration led by the University of NSW Sydney and FrontierSI.
Mr Nassif explained how it works: “Value Australia’s fully automated technology has the ability to learn inherent relationships and patterns between land value and sales price by analysing a complex set of land, property, locational and market movement data”.
And he expressed his confidence that the pilot program would “clearly demonstrate not only the accuracy of our technology but the potential for ongoing efficiency gains in strategic workforce planning, streamlined digital dispute resolution, auditing capabilities and quality assurance for land registries”.
PEXA Group CEO Glenn King added that the speed and cost effectiveness of the tool alone would have a huge impact when launched more widely.
“Value Australia’s groundbreaking technology has the potential to transform the land and property valuation process, delivering highly accurate valuations faster and at a lower cost than other methods,” Mr King said.
He added that since acquiring a 70 per cent stake in Value Australia in August 2022, PEXA had been working to “accelerate Value Australia’s path to commercialisation for the benefit of the industry and continue our advocacy as the true honest brokers in a complex and critical sector that is the engine room of the economy”.
Earlier in June, PEXA and Value Australia signed an MoU with the Australian Property Institute to further develop leading-edge solutions for the benefit of the industry and wider community.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Juliet Helmke
Based in Sydney, Juliet Helmke has a broad range of reporting and editorial experience across the areas of business, technology, entertainment and the arts. She was formerly Senior Editor at The New York Observer.
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