Two Pricing Regimes Within One Apartment Building

The core of Valtaic is our AVM. We spent a lot of time rebuilding and stress-testing it against millions of properties where the eventual sale price was known, looking for where it performed well, where it fell short, and what pricing evidence it needed.

One particular development repeatedly raised flags, run after run.

It was a purpose-built apartment building in the south of the UK, with around 70 units and broadly standardised layouts. A one-bed was usually much the same size and shape as another one-bed. Same for the studios and two-beds. On paper, comparable flats in the same building should have priced fairly tightly together.

They didn’t.

The model kept picking up a meaningful difference between units that looked almost interchangeable. In some cases, the gap was several hundred £/sqm. At first, we thought the issue was ours. We kept going back into the flat-scoring layer, changing it, testing it, pulling it apart and putting it back together. But the same pattern kept appearing.

Eventually, we found the answer.

The building was large enough to sit across two postcodes. Once we split the evidence properly, the pricing started to make sense. The postcode boundary provided a clue. It exposed subtle differences of floor height, unit outlook, unit positioning, and transaction evidence that were being absorbed into two slightly different micro-markets, creating two distinct pricing regimes within the same building.

That was the interesting part. The model was not hallucinating a difference. It was seeing something real before we had properly understood it.

That is exactly the kind of problem Valtaic is being built for. Residential property is often analysed through broad categories: postcode, bedroom count, property type, average price. But the market itself is much more granular. Value can move between streets, between blocks, and sometimes between two flats in the same building that look almost identical on a spreadsheet.

For an investor, landlord, adviser or agent, that matters. It can be the difference between understanding a price and simply accepting one. Valtaic is being built to surface those signals; what a property may be worth, why it is being valued that way, what evidence supports it, and where the hidden differences sit.