Interview with Raymond Dozier, CEO and Founder of Valuexpose

What is your startup and what does it do?

Valuexpose is a subscription-based, cloud software application (SaaS) that provides residential and commercial real estate valuation, value sustainability analysis, and project feasibility conclusions.  The users only need to fill up a 5-10 minute basic questionnaire to start getting real answers to their valuation, feasibility, and value sustainability questions in seconds.

At whom is your startup aimed?

Real estate professionals (appraisers, lenders, banks, realtors, etc.); and real estate participants in general (buyers, sellers, developers, flippers, etc). It works for both residential and commercial properties.

How does your startup stand out against its competitors?

What differentiates Valuexpose from its competitors is that it identifies buying, selling, lending, developing or remodeling opportunities on a property by property basis, by showing the relationships between the property’s current market value and its fundamental or “true value”, which is the value of the property that is unaffected by speculation caused by irrational future selling price expectations.

Current real estate valuation software is based on a property management point of view that calculates single-point-in-time values that provide no information at all about how detached is the market value from the market fundamentals.

Moreover, Valuexpose’s methodology not provides valuation, and value relationships, but additionally provides feasibility analysis for developers.

Did you have any concerns when starting your business, if so what were they?

Our main concern was how to create a valuation system that could be used by both real estate professionals and homebuyers with ease and clarity. We like to think we have done a good job at creating a simple to use technology.

What is your business background, and what got you interested in startups?

My business background is 40 years in residential and commercial real estate appraising. The main reason to start Valuexpose was the real estate market crash during 2006-2009. Trillions of dollars in wealth and assets were lost for Americans and American companies, because they didn’t have the tools to analyze real estate values before making buying, selling and lending decisions. Valuexpose provides those tools. If Valuexpose is widely used, real estate bubbles can be detected, and another market crash prevented.

How did you initially raise funding for your company?

So far Valuexpose has been 100% bootstrapped. Now that the system is working, has been tested and launched, we are looking for external investors and other forms of capital.

What has been your greatest achievement so far?

Converting our patent pending valuation methodology into a solid and easy to use, workable software. Valuexpose is without a doubt the biggest advancement in valuation methodology since the 1970s. It is a very complex array of Discounted Cash Flows, Components of Value, Timelines, Units of Comparison and Economic Graphs, putting it together was daunting, but a very enjoyable challenge.

How have you kept your business relevant and engaged with your audience over the last three years?

We are just launching, but we will love to answer this question in 2018.

How long has your business been in the making, and who is the team behind the business?

We have been working on putting together Valuexpose for over two years. The team is at this point composed by Raymond Dozier, MAI, the founder and CEO, who is the expert in valuation and creator of the methodology, and Francisco Miranda, co-founder and CTO, who translated the methodology into mathematical algorithms and computer code. The whole development includes a wonderful team of four web developers and programmers.

What has been your biggest challenge so far?

Our biggest challenge has been to bootstrap the business to take it all the way to the marketing phase.

In the coming year, what would you like to achieve with your business?

We have two main objectives (besides our sales goals). To incorporate all the property types into the software (there are 320 property types in our list, we are starting with the 20 most important ones), and to develop our Automatic Valuation Model (AVM).

What has been your most valuable lesson so far since starting your business?

That inspiration is fueled by action. In paper we started the development with 50% of what our final product has become. A lot of our best functionalities and features were born while developing, reviewing and talking with testers. When we began we thought we had everything laid out, and had no idea so many more things could be done to boost our user’s experience.

Finally, if you could give one piece of advice to someone thinking about starting a business, what would it be?

Do not linger too much on the planning stage, start doing. Action, perseverance and tenacity are the most important values of an entrepreneur.