Agribusiness and Trade: Valocity's app speeds up property valuation in India
That's because, aside from its sheer scale and the complexity of different language and ethnic groups, India posed some unique challenges for companies working in the property sector. Not least of these is the lack of a standardised addressing system in the Western sense.
Vicelich says Valocity has a role to play in that growth. Like elsewhere, Indian banks need a valuation before they can lend money on a property. That is just as important for entrepreneurs seeking finance as for people wanting to buy a house.
'Previously, valuation was very manual in India and based entirely on physical documents. It took weeks to complete a valuation — there was no technology involved. Banks were not digitally connected to valuers.
She describes what she found as a 'disparate and broken-up disintermediation — a fragmented ecosystem'.
India's valuers are often small one- or two-person operations, while some banks are huge. The big banks deal with tens of thousands of valuations each month. At the other end of the market are tiny banks, more like our idea of building societies. They typically lend on low-value properties and can be in remote areas. Both need better systems.
Valocity Founder and CEO Carmen Vicelich was part of the New Zealand delegation to visit India on the mission led by Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in March 2025.
She says: 'We realised we could make a massive difference and we also realised that we had to localise our systems. When solving the problem of no data, we looked to partner, we looked to buy. We found no one had accurate addressing data and that government records are not digitised. We also found that recorded sales prices are not necessarily what a buyer pays for a property because there can be a cash payment on top.'
Valocity developed a phone app and made it free for valuers. This was preloaded with banks' templates. When a valuer visits a property, the address is geotagged and photos are timestamped. The valuer has to take a selfie to prove he or she was at the property. This can all happen off-line, because mobile network coverage doesn't reach everywhere.
'The app makes calculations on the spot. Then all the data goes back to the bank digitally within ours of the visit. Everything the bank needs to know is there. We've managed to get 20 large banks live on the platform.'
While the systems were developed for valuing buildings, Indians are using it to value factory plants and machinery.
In some cases they drive the software to its limits. Vicelich says one user dragged and dropped 400 fields of data into the app and complained it was working slowly — the user was valuing a hospital.
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