How ValiFit Scores Towns & Properties
Every score on ValiFit is built from federal data and a single principle: infrastructure investment, not outcomes. We measure what each town spends and provides — not the demographics of who lives there.
The 8 composites
Each town and property gets percentile-ranked scores in eight composites. Every composite cites a federal data source and uses a defensible formula:
Why ValiFit is FHA-safe
The Fair Housing Act and Equal Credit Opportunity Act prohibit steering buyers away from neighborhoods based on demographic composition. Many real-estate scoring systems indirectly do this by including outcome metrics that are downstream of historic discrimination (school test scores, crime statistics in neighborhoods of color).
ValiFit uses infrastructure investment as the primary signal — what does this town spend on each composite? — rather than outcomes. A district with high per-pupil spending and good graduation rates scores well; a district with low spending scores poorly regardless of who lives there.
- Race, ethnicity, or national-origin demographics in scoring
- Religion in scoring
- Family-status (children) penalties
- Disability data in scoring
- SAT/test-score-only school rankings (we use grad rate ÷ spending)
- Pure crime-rate rankings (we use officer ratios + service density)
The mirror principle
ValiFit reports the data — we don't penalize, promote, or interpret. Every score, ranking, and number on this site comes directly from a federal source we can cite by URL. Our job is to align the mirror; the user's job is to look in it and decide what matters to them.
If a town has 6 hospitals within 35 miles, we say so — we don't rank it higher because we think hospitals should matter to you. If a school spends $24K per pupil with a 92% graduation rate, we surface those facts; you decide whether that's right for your family.
Data refresh cadence
- Daily: active listings, mortgage rates
- Monthly: NFIP claims, HRSA HPSA designations, Overture Maps refresh, Building Permits Survey
- Quarterly: CMS Hospital Quality, HHS HIFLD, BLS QCEW employment, FHFA HPI
- Biennial: CRDC discipline data (every 2 years per federal cycle)
- Annual: NCES F-33, EdFacts ACGR, FBI UCR, FHA loan limits, BEA personal income
Known limitations
- School scoring is district-level, not per-school. A great elementary inside an average district will inherit the district score; the per-school detail is on the school's entity page.
- Some federal datasets refresh annually or longer (NCES F-33 lags ~18 months from school year). We display the data year on each composite.
- Overture Maps POI completeness varies by city. Top-25 metros are typically >95% complete; rural counties may be 70-85%.
- FBI UCR is voluntary. ~12% of agencies don't report; we use county or state averages as fallback.