This essay discusses a variety of possibilities for improving current residential property valuation methodology. At present the inertia is unfavourable for innovative research within this field. It could, however, be argued that sustainability and other goals justify the effort to improve this state of affairs. With the focus on a relatively undeveloped European residential valuation academia in terms of innovations in modelling expertize, the proposition is to accommodate some of the following approaches: strict quantitative methods based on parametric hedonic regression; flexible (i.e. non/semiparametric) quantitative methods, that are still formally accommodated within mainstream economic modelling; flexible quantitative methods based on machine learning; rule-based expert systems of valuation; and methods, that use judgemental data (4th generation). Each of the techniques is evaluated in order to identify problems and subsequently appropriate directions for research are proposed. While having its obvious limitations, a method based on interviewing may serve a purpose in certain well-specified problem settings.
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Tom Kauko (2004) studied this question.