Big data and artificial intelligence: Casavo new valuation platform

A critical factor for the success of an Instant Buyer lays in its ability to drastically reduce the time for the sale process of a house, by carrying out purchase offers in the least amount of time. To do so, it has to rely on technology, a key factor that allows to optimize the buying process, while managing the increasing demands of our clients, without delays – in the last 6 months alone, online valuations have quadrupled in number!

Right from the start Casavo has focused on technology and transparency, two factors that summed up in the choice of providing an online valuation tool for real estate properties, active throughout Italy. We’ve been the first company to introduce a free online valuation system, without registration, which has represented a little revolution in the market. Today, two years after Casavo’s birth, we decided to make an additional step forward and present EVA, our new platform of algorithmic assessment of properties, to the public.

At present, more and more payers within our sector have understood the importance of a free valuation tool, making it available to their customers. Therefore, we decided to take a further step, with the goal to offer the most precise valuations on the market, to be even more trustworthy and transparent. The new algorithm system uses internal data, concerning transactions that have already been concluded, and publicly available data, such as geographical data and the ones related to price changes of recent months. This has allowed us to increase our accuracy by almost 20%, also thanks to some unique features that will be discussed in this article.

As we mentioned already, evaluating a house means comparing its features with the ones of a very similar property, that has already been sold or bought in the past. Based on the value of a transaction, similar to the property we’re evaluating, we will make corrections to determine the value of the property itself.

This is what EVA does , our owned property valuation platform, which has just replaced its previous version and it’s available on our website for free. By entering the datas of your property, the platform EVA will make an instant valuation of it. At the moment, this platform carries out valuations only for the cities in which we operate, while the valuations for the other cities are still being managed by the previous version of our valuation algorithm.

What are the unique characteristics of EVA?

To elaborate valuations, the platform uses data based on real transactions, carried out in the past and directly managed by Casavo. EVA examinates the details of the property it is evaluating and identifies similar properties in the system. Moreover, since each property is unique, this platform exploits artificial intelligence to adapt the property’s features to transactions, present on the database, that have been carried out already. For instance, if your house has an additional bathroom compared to a very similar house, already sold, the A.I. is able to calculate the impact of this bathroom on the final value of the property.

Following the introduction of this platform, our valuations will take into account new parameters and environmental factors, such as:

– The closeness of the property to train and subway stations

– The noise pollution caused by the closeness to railway and tram tracks

Moreover, we used a library that allows us to understand the importance of the variables used by the model. This library is called SHAP and it helps us to understand which the impact of different factors on the final valuation value will be. For example, in the picture below, you will be able to see that closeness to universities is a very relevant variable and, therefore, the properties which are closer to universities are evaluated with a higher price, while the farthest ones have a lower price.

Compared to the past, platform EVA is not based on a publicly available database, but uses data concerning actual past transactions directly managed by Casavo or by our partners: this allows us to use good, reliable data for our valuations.

In order to make our valuations even more accurate, our team is working to further improve our platform. One of EVA’s development potentials lays in the use of images of properties during the valuation process, to get more details that can affect the final value of valuation.