Truppraisal was founded by Tom Canale, who has spent more than twenty years in Arizona residential real estate valuation. The company exists because most home value tools hand over a figure and stop — and the question every homeowner asks next is “where did that number come from?”
The gap, stated plainly. The established way to estimate what a home is worth is to choose the sales that genuinely compare, adjust each one in dollars for what differs, and weigh what is left. An agent under time pressure, without the tooling, pulls a handful of nearby sales and averages them — and then has to defend the result to a seller who disagrees.
That is not a criticism of agents. It is a tooling problem. The method is decades old and almost entirely mechanical, so the software does it — automatically, the same way for every home.
One line we keep bright. Truppraisal Estimates are generated by software alone. No appraiser prepares, reviews or adjusts any estimate — every comp is picked and every adjustment is made automatically. When an agent makes it their own CMA, those changes are theirs, and Truppraisal’s own automated estimate stays printed beside their value.
Four decisions that make a Truppraisal Estimate different from a number on its own.
A price-per-square-foot multiplier treats a pool, a third garage bay and a half bathroom as though they were floor area. They aren’t. Truppraisal applies the same dollar rates to every comparable, on every estimate — the same way, every time.
Which sales count, and how much each one counts for, is the most consequential decision in any estimate. Done by hand under time pressure, it is also where bias creeps in — it is easy to pick the three sales that support the number you were hoping for. The TruComp Rating scores every recent nearby sale for similarity and lets the score decide the weighting.
Public records know a home’s size, lot, age, pool and garage, and what it sold for. They can’t see a remodeled kitchen or a roof at the end of its life. So a Truppraisal Estimate asks about condition, says plainly that the answer came from the homeowner, and shows every sale so the fit can be judged.
This is built for a homeowner to read. It prints every comparable sale it used, what each one was adjusted for, and in dollars, so the answer to “where did that number come from?” is on the page rather than in a support article.
Before any of this was software it was a question worth an hour: what can an automated value model actually do, and where does it fall over?
An hour with host Lance Billingsley on what automated valuation models can and cannot do, where they fall down on incomplete data, and — the part agents write in about — the single biggest mistake agents make when pulling comps.
The show has since become a book, The 13%: 87% of real estate professionals fail. Why the rest don’t — built from the podcast and its guests. Its name comes from the share of real estate professionals who last in the business.
Worth being exact about.
| Is not | Is | |
|---|---|---|
| What it produces | An appraisal | An automated home value estimate, generated by a computer model |
| Who prepares it | No appraiser prepares, reviews or approves it | Generated automatically, the same way for every property |
| What it is built from | Listing data | County public records and recorded sales |
| When an agent changes the comps | Truppraisal’s estimate edited by hand | A CMA prepared by the agent, supported by Truppraisal, with Truppraisal’s own automated estimate shown beside it |
| What it may be used for | Not for lending, tax, legal or estate purposes | Helping a homeowner understand what their house might sell for, and an agent have a better conversation |
We are deliberate about this. An automated estimate is a different thing from an appraisal, with different rules and a different purpose, and a product that blurred the two would be doing its users no favors.
Truppraisal, LLC is based in Peoria, Arizona, and the product is built against the Phoenix market. Arizona records the sale price of a home on the affidavit filed when the deed is recorded, which is what makes an estimate built from public records possible here. Truppraisal is live in Maricopa County, with more Arizona counties to follow.