Built for the number that has to hold up.
Lotwise is a price reference for jewellery and watch auctions in the Nordics. It exists for the moment after a valuation is written down, when somebody has to stand behind it.
Last updated .
Anyone can produce a figure. Defending it is the work.
An estate gets contested. A claim gets audited. A loan goes bad. In each case a number was written down earlier, and now it has to survive a person with a reason to disagree with it.
That is the problem Lotwise is built around. Not curiosity about what a piece might fetch, but the harder question of what you can show when asked.
The standard
Not all evidence is equal. We rank it, and we say which we used.
- A confirmed saleWhat a buyer actually paid, recorded and dated. The strongest thing there is.
- A hammer priceWhat one room agreed on, on one afternoon. Evidence, but it needs company before it means much.
- An estimate or an asking priceAn opinion, and a hope. Both are useful signals. Neither is proof of anything.
Where only the third kind exists, there is no reading to give, and we will say so rather than dress it up.
How we think about it.
Evidence over opinion.
An estimate is an opinion produced for a purpose. An asking price is a hope. What a piece actually sold for is the only one of the three that is evidence, and it is the one the reference is built on.
A range, not a figure.
A single number invites an argument about the last digit that nobody can win. A band with a stated confidence can be defended in a meeting, and its width tells you how much room there is to disagree.
Silence is a valid answer.
Where the record will not carry a reading, the output is that it will not. A confidence gate decides whether a question can be answered at all. That is the point of the thing rather than a limitation of it.
None of that is a house style we invented. Ranking evidence, and reporting a range with its uncertainty stated rather than a point, is how the valuation profession already writes it down: see the International Valuation Standards and RICS Valuation – Global Standards. What we are building is the evidence base underneath it, not a new method.
What we will not do.
We will not publish prices.
Not as a search, not as a table, not as a file to download. The reference is for the people who use it professionally.
We will not compete with the houses.
Bidding stays where it is, and the house keeps the relationship. Lotwise takes no consignments and no commission on a sale.
We will not answer on thin evidence.
A reading is withheld when the record behind it is too sparse to support one. You will be told which, and why.
We will not claim it works yet.
The method has not been tested against results held back for the purpose. Until it has, anything said about its accuracy would be unearned.
Who is behind this.
Two people, both reachable. If you write, one of us answers.
Marcus Clay
Market, customers and partnerships
Built the commercial case and the competitor work, and runs every conversation with houses, lawyers and insurers. He is the one who answers when you write.
Kristoffer Tølbøll
Data, method and product feasibility
Built the price engine, the reference behind it and the confidence gate that decides when a question cannot be answered. Decides what is possible before anything is promised.
If you value these things for a living, we want to hear from you.
Particularly if you have a live case and a real question. Those conversations decide what gets built next, and right now they are worth more to us than another name on a list.
Or leave an address on the front page and we will write once, when there is something to see. What we learn about this market along the way goes up under Writing.