Agribusiness and Trade: Valocity’s app speeds up property valuation in India

Valocity Founder and CEO Carmen Vicelich.

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 earlier this year. Her business specialises in property data. It was among the first New Zealand technology companies to open in India and now works with 20 of the leading lenders in that country.

During Valocity’s first meetings in India, banks would ask Carmen Vicelich: “What about the data?” and “How do you handle quality control?”

The founder and chief executive of the property valuation company, Vicelich says they were drawn to India as one of the fastest-growing economies.

“[It] was a massive challenge. We were excited to go there with our own technology and be the first in the market. We took the lessons we had learned in New Zealand and Australia: good governance, risk management and best practice.”

The opportunities were boundless. Vicelich says if you have good data, you can do portfolio management, securitisation provisioning.

“We had this amazing tech, and the key thing that really differentiated us, is that it is customisable and modular. It can handle complex rules. It can handle varied property types and it can handle regional nuances. All of these proved essential 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.