Valuation
Accurate valuation is the foundation of everything downstream of ownership: pricing a sale, deciding how much to lend against a parcel, and giving owners a credible sense of what they hold. Fabrica treats valuation as a first-class part of the protocol, surfaced on every property page, written into token metadata, and published as a signed on-chain reference price.
Why land valuation is hard
Most automated valuation models are built for houses, where sales are frequent and comparable. Raw land is the opposite case, and it is where general-purpose models are weakest:
- Sparse comparables. Many parcels rarely trade, and nearby sales can be scarce or stale.
- Land is not improved property. The value sits in location, size, access, topography, and zoning, not in a building that can be measured room by room.
- Noisy source data. A large share of recorded transactions are not arms-length (family transfers, bulk deals, gifts), and listing or asking prices are not the same as closed sale prices. Treating them as equal is a common cause of overvaluation.
These are real, well-studied problems. Fabrica's approach is built around them rather than around them being solved.
A multi-signal approach
Fabrica does not rely on a single black-box number. Several independent valuation signals are produced and shown for each property, each with its own context, so that buyers, sellers, lenders, and researchers can see where they agree and where they diverge:
| Signal | What it is |
|---|---|
| FabricaAVM | Fabrica's in-house automated valuation model, purpose-built for raw land, with a confidence level per estimate. |
| Prycd | A third-party land valuation signal, published alongside Fabrica's own so users can compare independent estimates. |
| Assessed value | The local tax assessor's value, useful for tax context (usually well below market). |
| Last recorded sale | The most recent county-recorded sale price, for historical context. |
For lending, these are triangulated rather than trusted individually. Independent signals that agree raise confidence; signals that diverge are a flag to be conservative. See Valuation signals and underwriting for how this works.
Where valuations appear
- Property pages on the Fabrica marketplace.
- Token metadata, so estimated value and confidence travel with the token to external marketplaces such as OpenSea and any application that reads the metadata.
- A signed on-chain reference price. Fabrica's estimated value is published as an EIP-712 signed quote through a public endpoint, consumable by lending pools, vault curators, and analytics tools. The same data that powers the property page powers the oracle. See Price Oracle for the signing scheme and integration details.
Estimates are a starting point
Valuation signals are inputs for evaluation, not official appraisals.
Land valuation is inherently imprecise, estimates vary between providers, and remote or unique parcels are harder to value accurately. Buyers and lenders should review comparable sales, consider a property's specific characteristics, and obtain a formal appraisal when the stakes warrant it. The published confidence level is there precisely so that low-confidence estimates are treated with appropriate caution.