Building your profile

The Build flow is a four-step wizard that turns "what matters to me about where I live" into the weights and constraints Custom RAAM uses to score every property afterwards. You can come back and revise any of it at any time.

The four steps

Profile basics. Your email (required), your name (optional), and a few orienting questions — buyer type, timeline to move, financing situation, and a free-form notes field for anything you want captured. Email is how your Dashboard link reaches you later.
Weights. Each of the seven factors (School Quality, Value for Money, Lot Size & Light, Home Age, Condition & Systems, Community Diversity, Commute Access) gets a weight. They must sum to 100. You can start from one of six named presets and adjust from there:
- Schools & yard — School Quality and Lot Size weighted heavily.
- Commute first — Commute Access dominant.
- Value investor — Value for Money dominant.
- Budget & condition — Value for Money plus Condition & Systems.
- Lifestyle / Remote — Lot Size and Light weighted for remote-first households.
- Balanced — every factor weighted equally (~14.3% each).
Dragging the sliders updates the preset hint to the closest match so you can tell when you've drifted materially from a named shape.
Requirements. Your hard must-haves — minimum beds, minimum baths, minimum living area, minimum lot size, maximum budget, maximum commute minutes, plus lists of preferred or excluded towns. These don't auto-disqualify a property in scoring, but the report flags every miss.
Review. A summary screen. Click back into any step to adjust. Finishing saves the profile and sends you to your Dashboard.

How weights actually work

The seven weights are a budget of 100 points. If School Quality matters twice as much as anything else to you, give it ~30 points and split the other 70 across the remaining six factors. If three factors are roughly equal priorities and the other four don't matter, loading 25 points each onto the first three and spreading the rest lightly is a reasonable shape.

The tool enforces the sum. If you drag School Quality up, the others rebalance downward by default — review the auto-rebalance before moving on.

A worked example

Say you're a commuter parent. Your three priorities are School Quality, Commute Access, and Value for Money. A first-pass weight set might be: 30, 25, 20, with the remaining 25 split across Lot Size (10), Home Age (5), Condition (5), Community (5). You save the profile, score three properties you've been watching, and notice one scored lower than your instinct said. Open Build, nudge Lot Size up to 15 and Home Age down to 0, re-score. If the reshuffle now matches your instinct, your weights now fit. If it doesn't, try Advisor for a guided conversation that suggests adjustments from your reactions.

Revising later

Everything in Build is editable. When you change weights or requirements, every property you've previously scored gets re-scored automatically against the new profile — nothing is lost, just re-ranked. The Dashboard shows the timestamp of your last profile edit so you can tell whether an old score reflects your current weights.

Common questions

Do I need an email to build? Yes — the email is how your Dashboard URL reaches you for future visits. It's not used for marketing.
What if my weights don't sum to 100? The tool prevents you from leaving the Weights step until they do. It offers a one-click rebalance if you're a point or two off.
Can I skip steps? Profile basics and Weights are required; most other fields have sensible defaults.
Can I have more than one profile? One per account today.

Custom RAAM Valuation — the context around this flow
Methodology — what each factor actually measures
Dashboard — where you land after finishing Build
Advisor — a guided way to refine weights