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Aims

The Valuation Engineer Journal advances the theory and practice of real-estate valuation as a rigorous, data-driven, and reproducible discipline. It bridges the long-standing gap between traditional appraisal practice and modern statistical and computational methods, giving appraisers, analysts, and researchers a venue to develop, document, and critique quantitative valuation techniques — and to hold them to engineering standards of transparency, testability, and reproducibility.

Scope

The Journal welcomes contributions on, among other related topics:

- Statistical and machine-learning methods for valuation — multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS), regularized regression (lasso, ridge,
elastic net), generalized additive models, and tree-based and ensemble methods
- Automated valuation models (AVMs) and hybrid appraiser–model workflows
- Residual analysis and constraint-based approaches to estimating subjective feature value
- Data sources, quality, and feature engineering for valuation (MLS and alternative data)
- Reproducibility, open data, and open-source software/tools (R, Python) for valuation
- Appraisal theory, methodology, standards (e.g., USPAP), and the doctrine–practice interface
- Valuation accuracy, uncertainty quantification, and appraisal bias and equity
- Mass appraisal, assessment, and market-area analysis
- Legal, regulatory, and ethical developments affecting valuation
- Applications of these methods to asset classes beyond residential real estate

Audience

Practicing appraisers and valuation professionals, assessors, quantitative analysts and data scientists, researchers, educators, and students.

What we publish

Research and methodology articles, software and tool guides, editorials, letters to the editor, commentary on recent court cases, and open problems and topics in need of authors.

Languages

The Journal publishes each article in English together with translated editions in German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese, and Traditional Chinese. These translations are prepared by the Journal and offered for the convenience of readers. The English edition is the version of record; where a translation and the English edition differ, the English edition governs.

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.

Editorial Model

This Journal does not practise anonymous peer review. Each submission is 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. This is a substitute for anonymous peer review, and the Journal does not represent it as equivalent.

The reason is structural rather than a matter of preference. The work published here sits at the intersection of non-parametric statistical modelling and real-estate appraisal practice. Statisticians can judge whether a model is correctly specified; appraisers can judge whether an adjustment is defensible. But the questions that decide whether a paper is right live at the interface between the two, and competence in both fields rarely accumulates in the same person. A reviewer holding only one half certifies only that half. Rather than claim a review process it cannot staff, the Journal states plainly what it does instead.

The weakness of this model is the mirror of that problem: an assessment made by one person, however assisted, is not independent scrutiny. The Journal therefore rests on reproducibility in place of authority. Articles publish the methods, data, and code needed to re-run the analysis, including machine-readable formalisations of the concepts an article depends on, so that a reader can check a claim rather than take it on the editor's word. A result that cannot be reproduced from what is published should be treated as unsupported, whatever the review process behind it.

Scrutiny after publication carries the weight that anonymous review would otherwise carry. Letters to the Editor, corrections, and challenges are actively invited and published, including where the Journal disagrees. Errors of substance are corrected by a published notice linked from the article, never by silent replacement of the file; where a correction changes a result, the DOI record is updated and the preservation copy is versioned.

Readers should be aware that in the inaugural issue the Editor-in-Chief is the author of all articles and the only person who evaluated them. The Journal regards this as a transitional state. It will adopt independent review for any submission where a competent and willing reviewer can be found, intends to move to conventional review if the pool of people working at this intersection grows, and is actively seeking outside contributions, correspondence, and reviewers. The current model reflects the field as it is, not a preference for less scrutiny.

Archiving and Preservation

Every article published in this journal is deposited in Zenodo, the open research repository operated by CERN, which assigns each deposit its own DOI and preserves it independently of this journal's infrastructure. Where an article also exists as a preprint, the published version is deposited as a new version under the same concept DOI, so that the whole version history remains resolvable from a single identifier.

Each article therefore exists in two places: here, under its Crossref DOI, and at Zenodo, under a versioned DOI. Each record declares the other, so either can be reached from the other. Were this journal's website to become unavailable, the published record would remain accessible and citable.

The journal does not at present participate in the PKP Preservation Network, LOCKSS, or CLOCKSS. The PKP Preservation Network has issued no release compatible with the journal's current platform version; LOCKSS and CLOCKSS require consortium arrangements not open to a journal of this size. The journal will join these networks when it is able to, and this statement will be updated accordingly.

Disclaimer

Views expressed are those of the authors and do not constitute appraisal, legal, or investment advice. Methods described herein must be applied by qualified professionals in conformance with applicable professional standards (e.g., USPAP) and the laws of their jurisdiction. The journal, its editor, and its publisher accept no liability for decisions made in reliance on published content.