Topic
Committees of role-specialised language-model agents that debate before answering are increasingly proposed as valuation tools. This paper asks whether the debate adds information. In a preregistered experiment on 631,866 arm's-length residential sales registered in Quebec between 2021 and 2026, evaluated under a…
A pseudo-real-time evaluation on 632,000 Quebec transactions and 82 local market indices, 2021–2026
This paper asks whether new forecasting architectures improve residential price forecasts over strong conventional methods, and under which conditions. Using the audited Quebec land-registry sample of UQO Working Paper 22 (632,006 sales, 2021–2026) and its real-time quality-adjusted index vintages, it defines three…
Evidence from Québec single-family listings matched to the assessment roll
The cost approach to value requires a specification of the improvements — materials, finish grade, condition, renovations — that assessment rolls do not record and that appraisers obtain by inspection. This paper asks whether that specification can be extracted from the photographs and text of a for-sale listing by…
Evidence from 391,000 Single-Family Transactions in Quebec, 2021–2026
The sales comparison approach is the dominant method of residential valuation, yet its operating rules — how many comparables to use, how far and how far back to search, which adjustments to apply, how to weight and reconcile — rest largely on professional convention. This paper subjects these rules to a…
Hedonic house-price models are bounded by the characteristics an analyst can measure, yet much of a home's value is recorded only in the free-text description and photographs of its listing. This paper treats general-purpose AI models as a feature-engineering technology: a large language model converts each…
A Systematic Assessment of Hedonic Specifications and Estimation Methods for the Quebec Housing Market, 2021–2026
Fifty years after Rosen (1974), applied hedonic practice still rests on specification choices (functional form, temporal controls, spatial controls, estimation method) that are made by convention and rarely stress-tested jointly. Using 514,212 Quebec residential sales (2021–2026) whose structural descriptors come from…
Decomposing the Value of Structure and Location across 142,121 MLS Listings with High-Dimensional Neighbourhood Fixed Effects
This paper estimates a national hedonic price function for the Canadian residential market on a cross-section of 142,121 active MLS listings from nine provinces. A semi-logarithmic specification relates the log list price to structural attributes, dwelling type and ownership form, and 1,155 absorbed neighbourhood…
This paper compares econometric and machine-learning approaches to hedonic housing valuation on 788,842 active Zillow listings covering all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia, and asks how much of the machine-learning advantage survives when models must price homes in markets they have not seen. A semi-log…