How Fred works
Valuation is a “your money or your life” subject — get it wrong and someone sells a £900 plane for £90. So we don’t ask you to trust us. We show the work: how every price is graded, what we will and won’t publish, and the line we never cross.
1. Every price is graded by evidence
Bad labels are worse than no labels — a wrong comp corrupts the model silently, and the model is the product. So every price entering the system is graded, and the bottom tier is banned outright.
BANNED from the index. Forum posts, self-reports, “I got £400 for it.” Colour only, never a price.
Live listings and classifieds. An upper bound only — what someone hopes to get, not what anything sold for.
Completed sales incl. accepted offers. Validation and a prior — checked by hand, never scraped.
Auction results that houses publish. A real price a real buyer paid. Index input.
Our own consignment and hammer prices. Definitionally true — no hearsay, no anchoring, no selection bias.
Why hearsay is banned: the person who got a good price replies; the one who got fleeced stays quiet; and both anchor on the number we just showed them. Selection bias plus anchoring plus self-report isn’t a dataset — it’s a rumour with a decimal point.
2. Identification is guided capture — because type is the value
A photo model will confidently say “Stanley No. 4 bench plane.” Correct, and worthless: a No. 4 is a No. 4 from 1910 to 1970, and the price swings 5–10× across that span. What moves the number is the type — lateral lever shape, the casting behind the frog, the iron, condition, whether parts have been swapped.
So Fred doesn’t say “send a picture.” Once it has a provisional ID, it asks for exactly what the type study needs, one prompt at a time: “now the lever cap,” “now the logo on the iron,” “now the tote, close, for cracks.” That turns a civilian into a competent data collector and yields a real identification instead of a shoebox of blur.
3. Two rules we don’t bend
- No comp, no page. We never publish a valuation without at least one real (Tier 3+) sale behind it. That’s the line between a proprietary dataset and scaled content abuse.
- Never a point estimate from a photo. Always a range, the number of comps, and “market estimate, not a formal appraisal.” The uncertainty is honest — closing it is what the guided capture is for.
4. We take no position in what we value
We act as agent, never as principal. We don’t buy to resell, we don’t deal, and we don’t charge makers for coverage. The index stays descriptive (what sold) and never prescriptive (what it’s worth). That’s what keeps the referee off the pitch — and it’s why, as our own auction results grow, a valuation stops being an opinion and becomes a record.
5. Experience, and corrections
The strongest thing behind a valuation is having actually sold the thing. As we consign and, later, run our own sales, every controlled sale feeds back photos, a verified ID, verified condition, and the price it truly made — a labelled record that makes the next estimate better.
As those sales accrue, this is where the record will live — how many of a model we’ve handled, and what they made — and never a figure we can’t stand behind.
Spot something we got wrong? Fred wants the correction: fred@fredshed.tv.