Truppraisal was founded by Tom Canale, a certified residential appraiser in Arizona with more than two decades of appraisal experience. The product exists because an appraiser and an automated value look at the same house and answer the same question completely differently, and only one of them shows its work.
The disconnect, stated plainly. An appraiser chooses the sales that genuinely compare, adjusts each one in dollars for what differs, and weighs what is left to reach a value. An agent, under time pressure and 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 appraiser’s method is more than half a century old and almost entirely mechanical, and nobody had automated it for the agent's side of the desk — not because it is impossible, but because the people building valuation software had never done it by hand.
This is not a founder story for its own sake. It is the reason the software works differently.
A price-per-square-foot multiplier treats a pool, a third garage bay and a half bathroom as though they were floor area. Anyone who has spent an afternoon building an adjustment grid knows what each of those is actually worth in their market, and knows the multiplier is a shortcut that produces a number nobody can defend. Truppraisal applies the same dollar rates to every comparable, on every report — the same way, every time.
The most consequential decision in any valuation happens before a single number is written down: which sales count, and how much each one counts for. Done by hand under time pressure, it is also where bias creeps in — it is very 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, so nobody hand-picks the flattering three.
MLS records leave things out, and twenty years of working with them teaches you which things. A sale that closed with heavy seller concessions is not worth what the price says. A remodel that never made it into the listing remarks may as well not exist. Fields get reported differently from one year to the next. A model that treats every record as equally reliable will average those problems in; this one was built by someone who had already run into all of them.
Most valuation documents are built for a lender to file away. This one is built for a homeowner to read, because the question an agent actually gets asked is never “what is the number” but “where did that number come from?” An appraisal report answers that question and almost nothing else automated does.
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 13%: 87% of real estate professionals fail. Why the rest don’t. grew out of the podcast and its guests — the same argument the show has been making for two years about what separates the professionals who last from the ones who don’t.
The 13% Podcast is hosted by Lance Billingsley and takes its name from the share of real estate professionals who last in the business.
Worth being exact about, because the distinction is the product.
| Is not | Is | |
|---|---|---|
| What it produces | An appraisal | An automated valuation, built by a computer model |
| Who prepares it | Not prepared or reviewed by a licensed appraiser | Generated automatically, the same way for every property |
| What it may be used for | Not for lending, mortgage, credit, tax, legal, insurance or estate purposes | Helping a homeowner understand what their house is worth, and an agent have a better conversation |
| Where the method came from | Not borrowed from another software product | The sales comparison approach, automated end to end |
We are deliberate about this. An automated valuation model 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 favours. What Truppraisal borrows from appraisal is the method — and the method is the part everyone else left out.
Truppraisal, LLC is based in Peoria, Arizona, and the product was built against the Phoenix market, in a non-disclosure state where sale prices are not published in the records national products rely on, and MLS data is the only sound basis for a valuation. Building somewhere that unforgiving is the reason the model does not fall back on public-record estimates the way national products do: there was nothing to fall back on.