Submissions

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Author Guidelines

Language

Submissions must be made in English. The Journal is not at present able to assess work submitted in other languages. Authors who would prefer to write in another language are welcome to enquire before submitting. Accepted articles are translated by the Journal into eleven further languages; the English edition remains the version of record.

How submissions are assessed

This Journal does not use anonymous peer review. Each submission is first checked by the Editor-in-Chief against the aims and scope, and may be declined at that stage if it falls outside them or does not meet minimum standards of quality. Submissions that proceed are assessed by the Editor-in-Chief with the assistance of AI systems that evaluate methodology, internal consistency, reproducibility, clarity, and coverage of the relevant literature. The Editorial Model section of the About page explains why the Journal works this way, what the weaknesses of that model are, and what it does to compensate. Independent review will be sought for any submission where a competent and willing reviewer can be found.

Originality

Submissions must be original work that has not been published elsewhere and is not under consideration by another journal. Prior appearance as a preprint or working paper is not a bar to publication, provided it is disclosed at submission and cited in the article. Submissions are checked editorially against the published literature before assessment. The Journal is enrolling in Crossref Similarity Check and will screen all submissions through that service once enrolment is complete; this statement will be updated at that point.

Data, code, and reproducibility

Because this Journal rests on reproducibility rather than on the authority of reviewers, the evidence an article supplies matters more here than it would elsewhere. Where a result depends on data or code, authors are expected to make both available, or to explain why they cannot — deposit them in a public repository and cite them in the article. A result that a reader cannot reproduce from what is published will be treated as unsupported.

Permissions, authorship, and ethics

Authors are responsible for obtaining permission to publish any third-party material included with the submission, such as photographs, documents, and datasets; that material remains under its original terms. All authors identified on the submission must have contributed materially to the work and must consent to being identified. Contributions from AI systems do not constitute authorship; where AI tools materially assisted the analysis or the drafting, that assistance should be disclosed in the article. Where appropriate, research should be approved by an appropriate ethics committee in accordance with the legal requirements of the study's country.

Conflicts of interest

Authors must disclose any financial or professional interest that could be seen to influence their results — consulting relationships, ownership of or involvement in software discussed in the article, or engagement by a party to a valuation dispute the article addresses. Disclosure does not disqualify a submission; concealment does.

Preparing the manuscript

Please ensure that the study design and the argument are clearly structured before submitting. The title should be concise and the abstract should stand on its own. Authors are assumed to have checked their submissions with spelling and grammar checkers. When you are satisfied that your submission meets this standard, please follow the checklist below to prepare it.

Fees

The Journal charges no fees of any kind: no article processing charges, no submission fees, no page or colour charges, and no charge for translated editions.

Submission Preparation Checklist

All submissions must meet the following requirements.

  • This submission meets the requirements outlined in the Author Guidelines.
  • This submission has not been previously published, nor is it before another journal for consideration.
  • All references have been checked for accuracy and completeness.
  • All tables and figures have been numbered and labeled.
  • Permission has been obtained to publish all photos, datasets and other material provided with this submission.

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the editor will be published if they are restricted to polite questions, comments and arguments, with decorum.  The editor will respond as appropriate.

Foundations

The editor presents a selection of foundational definitions needed to understand terminology and concepts discussed in valuation engineering.  Appraisers often here terms such as hedonic regression bantied about, with out a good understanding what they mean.   This is your chance to brush up on fundamental concepts and terms.

Articles

The Articles section is the journal's principal section and carries its substantive scholarship: original research together with rigorous methodological, conceptual, and practice contributions on the theory, practice, regulation, and computation of real-estate and asset valuation. Quantitative and computational submissions are expected to document their data sources and model specifications and to report out-of-sample or cross-validated performance rather than in-sample fit alone; claims about professional practice should be grounded in recognized standards such as USPAP and the International Valuation Standards, and regulatory claims in primary sources. Authors must disclose funding, employment, and client relationships, any commercial interest in the methods or assets discussed, and any use of generative-AI tools.

At launch, submissions to this section undergo editorial review (AI-assisted); independent external peer review will be introduced as the journal grows, and each article's review status is recorded on the published version. Where the editor is also an author, that relationship is disclosed and the article is identified as editor-reviewed.
 Accepted articles receive persistent identifiers (Crossref and Zenodo DOIs) and fall under the journal's corrections-and-versioning policy.

Comparative Practice

Cross-jurisdictional comparison of valuation practice and its institutions: who may value, under which rules, and how the systems differ.

Recent Court Decisions

Recent Court Decisions surveys recent developments in property valuation law across accessible jurisdictions. Each installment covers a region, reporting decisions, statutes and regulations from the months preceding publication, and referencing each jurisdiction's primary sources.

A jurisdiction is counted as covered only where an installment addresses that jurisdiction's law. Materials are read in their original language where possible and in machine translation where not; each translated source is marked and linked so that it can be checked.

The department reports instruments as written. It does not warrant how they are applied in practice. Some jurisdictions are represented by statute and established practice rather than by a decision from the period, and some entries rest on secondary sources rather than official reports; both are marked where they occur. Readers should not rely on the Journal's English descriptions alone.

Jurisdictions are omitted for stated reasons — inaccessible court records, no accessible primary law, or not yet surveyed — and the omissions are listed rather than left silent.

Installments are written by the editor. The department particularly welcomes corrections from practitioners working in the jurisdictions surveyed remotely; these are published as Letters to the Editor or incorporated with acknowledgement.

Protocols

Protocols are specific instructions for executing a defined valuation task. A protocol is not a standard: standards are issued by the professional bodies, and a protocol says how a task is carried out, not what the profession requires.

The department publishes protocols and the drafts that precede them. A draft carries a v0.x designation and is marked not citable in a conformance claim; it is published so that it can be read, tested and commented on before release. Comments go to the editor and their disposition is recorded.

Publication of a protocol creates no obligation on any valuer, and adoption by any authority is that authority's decision. A protocol being followed exactly does not make its result correct.

Recent Court Cases - Central & Sourth America

This section displays summaries of recent Central & Sourth American court cases in the 3-6 months prior to publication date.   There may be an extended discussion of the case if it has special interest.  Also, the first issue covers 2025 through May 2026.

Software Reviews

Reviews of software and methodologies.

Articles Needed

Describes areas where additiona articles are needed.

Copyright Notice

Authors retain copyright in their work. By submitting to this journal, authors grant the journal a non-exclusive right of first publication, with the work simultaneously licensed under CC BY 4.0.

Authors are free to deposit the published version in any repository, post it on a personal or institutional website, or reuse it in later work, without seeking permission, provided the original publication in this journal is cited.

Third-party material reproduced in an article (figures, datasets, extended quotations) remains under its original terms; authors are responsible for obtaining any permission required.

Privacy Statement

Effective date: July 1, 2026

1. Who we are

The Valuation Engineer Journal ("VEJ", "the journal", "we") is published by Pacific Vista Net of 242 Clifton Rd, Pacifica, CA. We are the data controller for personal data processed through this site.

For privacy-related questions or to exercise your rights under this notice, contact us at wbcraytor@valuation-engineer.com.

2. What personal data we collect

  • Account data — name, email, optional affiliation, ORCID iD, biographical statement, country, role (author / reviewer / reader).
  • Submission data — manuscripts, figures, abstracts, supplementary files, and metadata you submit; plus messages exchanged during the editorial workflow.
  • Editorial activity — submission, review, and editorial decisions; comments and timestamps from the workflow.
  • Web-server data — IP address, browser/user-agent, requested URL, referrer, and timestamps, recorded automatically in server logs.
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We do not intentionally collect special-category data (health, religion, etc.). If your submission contains such data, you remain responsible for disclosing it lawfully.

3. Why we process this data and on what legal basis

(GDPR Art. 6 terms; equivalents apply under UK GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, LGPD, PIPEDA, etc.)

  • Running the editorial workflow — performance of a contract / pre-contract, and legitimate interest in operating a scholarly journal.
  • Making accepted work permanently and openly accessible — legitimate interest in scholarly communication. Published metadata (see §5) becomes permanently public.
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  • Contacting you about your submission or account — performance of a contract.
  • Newsletters or announcements — consent. You may withdraw at any time.

4. AI-assisted review — please read carefully

We disclose this plainly because it is unusual in academic publishing: at this stage of the journal's launch, review is conducted by the founding editor with substantial AI assistance (currently Anthropic's Claude models, accessed via the Anthropic API). This is not double-blind external peer review, and we do not describe it as such.

Practical implications for your data:

  • Your manuscript text, abstract, figures (where reduced to text), and reviewer-facing metadata may be sent to Anthropic's API to generate AI-assisted review feedback.
  • As of this notice's effective date, Anthropic's API terms state that inputs submitted via the API are not used to train Anthropic's models by default. We have not opted in to any training-data sharing.
  • We retain AI-generated review comments alongside the human editorial record.

If you do not wish your submission to be processed through an AI-assisted review pipeline, please contact us before submission.

5. Public metadata — what becomes permanently public

Accepted and published articles include metadata that is made openly available and indexed by third parties:

  • Author name(s), affiliation(s), ORCID iD (if provided), and corresponding-author contact if you choose to publish it.
  • Article title, abstract, DOI, and citation metadata.

This metadata is registered with Crossref (which assigns DOIs and distributes citation metadata broadly), and may be harvested by indexes such as Google Scholar, DOAJ, and other discovery services. Once registered with Crossref, this metadata is effectively permanent and cannot be fully retracted from third-party indexes even if an article is later withdrawn.

6. Other third parties that process your data on our behalf

  • Hosting: the site runs on a virtual server provided by RackNerd, LLC (United States). All site data is therefore stored on infrastructure located in the United States.
  • Email delivery: transactional email (account, submission, review notifications) is sent via smtp.gmail.com.
  • DOI registration and metadata distribution: Crossref (as in §5).
  • AI review pipeline: Anthropic, PBC (as in §4).
  • Indexing & discovery: Google Scholar, DOAJ, and similar services may crawl public pages.

We do not sell personal data. We do not share personal data with advertising or behavioural-analytics networks.

7. International transfers

Because the site is hosted in the United States, personal data of authors, reviewers, and readers outside the US is transferred to the US when you interact with the site. If you are in the EU, UK, or another jurisdiction that requires additional safeguards for international transfers, you should be aware that we cannot independently offer Standard Contractual Clauses or equivalent measures beyond those provided by our hosting provider.

8. Retention

  • User accounts: retained for up to the lifetime of the journal or until you request deletion; inactive accounts may be reviewed periodically. Inactive accounts or accounts considered spam may be deleted at any time.
  • Submissions and editorial records: retained indefinitely as part of the scholarly record (standard practice in academic publishing). Published articles may also be immutably stored on CERN/Zenodo.org computers in Switzerland.
  • Web-server logs: 30–90 days.

9. Your rights

Depending on where you live, you may have the right to:

  • access the personal data we hold about you;
  • correct inaccurate data;
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  • object to or restrict processing;
  • receive a copy of your data in a portable format;
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To exercise any of these rights, email wbcraytor@valuation-engineer.com. We may need to verify your identity before acting. Note that published article metadata (§5) is part of the permanent scholarly record and cannot be fully removed from third-party indexes.

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We use TLS (HTTPS) for all site traffic and standard access controls. No system is perfectly secure; in the event of a personal-data breach affecting you, we will notify you and the relevant supervisory authority as required by law.

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This site is not directed at children under 16. We do not knowingly collect personal data from children.

13. Changes to this notice

We may update this notice from time to time. Material changes will be highlighted on the site and dated at the top.