New Zealand’s economy has been described as a “housing market with bits tacked on”. Buying and selling property is a national sport fuelled by the rising value of homes across the country.
But the wider public has little understanding of how those property valuations are created – despite their being a key factor in most banks’ decisions about how much they are willing to lend for a mortgage.
Automated valuation models (AVM) – systems enabled by artificial intelligence (AI) that crunch vast datasets to produce instant property values – have done little to improve transparency in the process.
