Valcre, the commercial real estate appraisal platform built by appraisers for appraisers, is proud to celebrate our 10-year anniversary. The milestone coincides with the rollout of the most significant product expansion in our history: a purpose-built suite of artificial intelligence tools designed to help appraisers produce higher-quality reports with greater speed and efficiency.
Where it all began
Established in 2016 by our founders, Lucas Rotter, Grant Norling, MAI, and Kris Owens, Valcre launched with a straightforward premise: to modernize a profession that had gone too long without purpose-built software.
Lucas began his appraisal career in 2007 and joined Colliers International in 2008. In 2010, he shifted his focus to technology and spent six years building the firm’s valuation platform from the ground up. Through that experience, he saw firsthand how much time appraisers lost to broken workflows, repetitive data entry, and disconnected tools.
Grant brought more than two decades of commercial appraisal experience, including corporate valuation leadership and running his own firm.
Kris brought the engineering discipline, arriving from Microsoft with the technical foundation to build what the profession had long been missing.
Our growth story
Over the past decade, Valcre has achieved numerous growth milestones:
- More than 300 appraisal firms, ranging from sole proprietors to global enterprises, rely on Valcre to operate their businesses.
- The platform has supported more than 500,000 property appraisals and houses over 4.5 million verified comparables.
- The platform integrates with more than 100 third-party data sources and supports 16 property types and six specialty practice areas, making it the broadest appraisal platform in the industry.
- In the past year alone, Valcre processed more than 100,000 appraisals.
- Appraisers using Valcre save more than two hours every day.
The impact on appraisal professionals who use Valcre to run their businesses has been tangible. For example, the team at Cogito Realty Partners delivers appraisal reports 50% faster with Valcre.
A new era of AI, purpose-built for appraisers
The anniversary marks the continued rollout of Valcre’s AI product suite purpose-built for commercial real estate appraisers. Earlier this year, Valcre launched Narrative Writer and AI Comp Suggestions.
Narrative Writer generates report narrative directly within an appraiser’s existing workflow, while AI Comp Suggestions identifies and ranks relevant comparable properties for the appraiser’s review. Neither product requires users to learn prompting techniques or move between separate applications. These tools have already seen exciting adoption; since rolling out in April, 80% of content generated by Narrative Writer has been incorporated into completed reports.
Now, Valcre is beginning the rollout of AI Import, which reads documents such as Rent Rolls, Leases, Expense Statements, and Offering Memoranda, and subsequently maps the extracted data directly into the Valcre database. This eliminates manual re-entry, which represents the single largest non-analytical time sink in the appraisal workflow.
All three tools are designed around the same principle that has guided Valcre for a decade: the appraiser remains the expert. The technology handles repetitive execution so appraisal professionals can spend more time exercising judgment, analyzing risk, and forming credible opinions of value.
“Ten years ago, we set out with a simple belief: appraisers deserve technology built around how they actually work. Today, we’re incredibly proud to have built a platform that enables appraisal professionals to spend more of their time forming opinions of value instead of fighting admin and duplicative work,” said Lucas Rotter, CEO and Co-Founder, Valcre.
“None of this would have been possible without the perseverance of our team and its willingness to solve genuinely hard problems,” Rotter added. “Our new AI suite represents the beginning of so much more to come, and I can’t wait to see what our customers accomplish with it.”
Valcre enters its second decade with a 60-person team, serving firms across the United States, Canada, and markets globally. Notable clients include Kroll, Avison Young, Baker Tilly, Grant Thornton, Apprise by Walker & Dunlop, RSM, and CohnReznick.
