This website serves to expedite collaboration among valuation professionals who are developing rules and models for property inspection and valuation. There are distinguishing characteristics of this website, as compared to other websites that deal with valuation:
- The focus is on building useful models for property inspection and valuation.
Almost equal importance placed on inspection as on valuation itself. A critical belief is that genuine property value estimation must always be preceded by actual or proxy inspection. Methods which purport to provide value estimates wihout such inspection can only provide "Rough Guesses" of value and should not be called value estimates.
Unfortunately there is little theory behind the process of inspection: "Despite the incursion of inspection and monitoring activity in every sphere of human life, its theory as a scientific discipline does not have an adequately developed methodological basis. The fundamental concepts and definitions lack clarity, the approaches to research on the inspection (monitoring) of items of a diverse physical and mathematical nature are devoid of unity, the formulations of problems are not general enough, and so on.Until the middle of this century, the principal realm of engineering applications of inspection was piecework production in machinery construction, engine building, clockmaking, etc. As a rule, certain dimensions of articles, i.e., entities that could be described by a one-dimensional measurable quantity, were subjected to inspection. Inspection itself was regarded as the "determination of whether the true value of the measured quantity lies within or outside of its limiting values". The fundamental methodological components of scientific research in this kind of inspection, namely its object, subject, problems, methods of solution, etc., assumed a fairly obvious interpretation. The category of technical entities encompassed by inspection expanded continuously. They corresponded more and more closely to the new systems-design notions emerging in science and industry. Theoretical importance became attached to entities described by a set of vector quantities (e.g., production lots) or quantitative attributes (as in the case of dynamic systems and technological aggregates). New methods were required for the design and analysis of the inspection or monitoring process. Of course, they still did not necessitate a wholly new conceptualization of the basic methodological ideas and could be developed within the framework of the same initial treatments. But when theoreticians redirected their attention from discrete items to technological processes described by functional quantities, it became clear that such inspection could not be built on the old foundation. Discussions about the very definition of inspection (monitoring) commenced at that time [Bolychevtsev, Tsapenko, Shenbrot - The Methodological Foundations of Inspection Theory]."
- Laws and court cases, including general standards such as USPAP, are discussed only as they translate into constraints on inspection and valuation. That is to say, such laws and standards are not regarded as an antecedent to good valuation, but rather as constraints that can vary independently of general valuation models from locale to locale.
- International collaboration is seen as a way to bring together talented individuals to speed up development of new methodology.
- Discussion, including unbiased reviews, of current hardware and software tools is encouraged.
- Sharing of opinion polls and other member initiated market survey results is also encouraged as a basis for developming new methods and models.
- Discussion and opinions are limited to tools, models, techniques, ideas and methodology. Rating, criticism or other comments, good or bad, directed at individuals is not tolerated. Note that caution must be exercised when reviewing company products, so as to avoid liability issues.
Translations
