Approximate Valuation

Extract

It may not unfairly be said that the earliest approximate valuation method—Woolhouse's—was born out of its time. Presented as it was nearly fifty years ago to a world whose views on such matters were rather different from our own, it attracted but little attention, and appears to have given rise to no subsequent developments. Indeed, the author himself seems to have thought rather slightly of the suggestion, and in the brief discussion which followed the reading of his paper, emphasised distinctly that he regarded the method merely as an auxiliary check. The truth is, the idea was altogether too simple, and so has suffered half-a-century of neglect whilst other methods (some of which have received impressive algebraic treatment and given rise to a quite extensive literature), dating from independent investigations made many years after Woolhouse's, have been devised, tested, acclaimed and have passed into current use. And so we come to the latest pronouncement on Woolhouse's method, the almost ex cathedra sentence passed by Mr. Lochhead in “Valuation and Surplus“ (page 52) that the “method is extremely simple, but is not very powerful.”