The blue light of the iPad hummed at 11:35 PM, casting a stark, digital glow across my face. I toggled, again, between the two numbers. Mine, a dispiriting $475,555. Theirs, my neighbor’s, a baffling $485,555. Just last week, mine had ticked down $2,555, a silent, algorithmic judgment against the new roof I’d painstakingly installed just 45 months ago. Theirs, the house with the tired chain-link fence and the perpetually overgrown hydrangeas, had somehow climbed $5,555. The screen shimmered, a portal to a valuation logic that felt increasingly alien, even insulting.

I remember arguing this exact point, exasperated, with a friend who swore by AVMs, convinced their data was infallible. I lost that argument, not because I was wrong, but because the sheer weight of perceived data often trumps inconvenient truths. It’s like telling Nora S.-J., the sand sculptor, that her magnificent, ephemeral castle, built with 5,555 grains of carefully chosen sand, is worth the same as a child’s crude bucket mound. She understands texture, wind, the fleeting beauty of a perfect tide, the unseen forces that shape value. The algorithm, however, sees only ‘sand structure’ – a crude approximation.

There was a time, I’ll admit, when I first bought into the digital oracle. The early days of these Automated Valuation Models (AVMs) felt revolutionary, a promise of instant, objective truth, free from