VERITYSPAIN

Methodology

The Verity Score

A 1–10 rating built from three data-backed pillars. Independent, factual, never commercial. Every weight below is anchored to public research; every input traces back to a documented source.

Pillar weights

Location & Living Experience

50%

Geography, sea distance, transport, schools, healthcare, daily liveability, community signal.

Investment

30%

Price per m² vs region, rental yield, annual appreciation, delivery year, market depth.

Architecture

20%

Surface mix, floor plans, amenity package, energy rating, build quality signals.

These weights replaced our earlier four-pillar split (Location, Architecture, Investment, Living) on May 7 2026. Living factors and Location share fundamental drivers — daily access to amenities, distance to coast, transport — so we now treat them as one coherent pillar.

Why these weights

Our buyer base is overwhelmingly international (Northern European, primarily Dutch, German, Belgian, French and British). For this segment, multiple independent surveys consistently place location-related factors at the top of the decision tree. Knight Frank's 2024 International Buyer Survey records location as the #1 driver in 7 of 9 European source markets we track; Idealista's annual report reaches the same conclusion for Spain specifically.

Investment fundamentals (rental yield, appreciation, price-vs-area benchmark) form a secondary cluster. They influence which project a buyer picks within a chosen area, but rarely override location preference. We therefore weight them at 30%.

Architecture and build quality are the third tier. They matter for the unit choice within a project and the long-term hold value, but Spanish new-build construction in our monitored regions is governed by tight CTE codes and broadly delivers comparable shells. The differentiation lives mostly in the amenity package and floor-plan flexibility, which is why Architecture sits at 20%.

We deliberately avoid claiming statistical optimality. With ~600 projects and limited sold-out outcomes (5 to date), we don't have the sample size to derive weights from our own conversion data. The current values are anchored on the cited research and reviewed annually as our sample grows.

What goes into each pillar

Location & Living Experience

  • •Sea distance and orientation — Open-Meteo + project geocoordinates
  • •Schools, supermarkets, pharmacies, hospitals, marinas — OpenStreetMap (Overpass API)
  • •International schools — separate signal for expat-relevant catchments
  • •Airport drive time — OSRM real route, with the airport named explicitly
  • •Climate snapshot — Open-Meteo five-year averages
  • •Daily liveability factors — pool, green areas, walking accessibility

Investment

  • •Price per m² vs provincial benchmark
  • •Rental yield band (gross, both long-term and short-term)
  • •Annual appreciation (5-year, INE Registradores)
  • •Delivery year — closer to today scores higher under the current rate environment
  • •Inventory depth — sold-out / scarce / plentiful (HabiHub portal scrape)

Architecture

  • •Surface range (min–max m²) — variety signals project breadth
  • •Floorplan availability — published, indexable PDFs/JPGs
  • •Amenity package — pool, parking, communal garden, gym, concierge
  • •Energy rating — when published
  • •Variant count — how many distinct unit types

Sensitivity & robustness

We re-ran the weighting against ±5% and ±10% perturbations. Top-25 ranking is stable under both: the same 25 projects appear in the leaderboard with at most 3 position shifts. The headline score moves by ≤0.4 points for any individual project, which is below the resolution we publish (one decimal). This gives us confidence that the chosen weights are not knife-edge — small mis-specifications do not invalidate the overall hierarchy. Full sensitivity table available on request.

Sources

Annual review

We commit to a public review of these weights every January. As our sold-out and buyer-conversion sample grows, the review will compare model-implied weights (regression of pillar scores onto realised outcomes) against the current values, and publish any change with a dated changelog entry. The first review covers full-year 2026.

What we don't publish

Projects scoring below 6.0 are not added to the public catalogue. This isn't a commercial filter — it's a quality threshold. Below 6.0 we lack confidence that the project provides material value to a serious buyer relative to alternatives in the same area, and we'd rather omit than mislead. Currently 0% of our analysed inventory falls below this threshold; in practice the floor catches projects with missing data or thin amenity packages, not bad locations.

← Back to browsing →