Glossary

Paired Sales Analysis

Also known as: Matched Pair Analysis

A quantitative adjustment technique that isolates the market's reaction to a single variable — such as an extra parking space, a superior corner location, or a shorter time-on-market — by comparing two otherwise-similar sales that differ primarily in that one characteristic, and attributing the resulting price difference to that variable.

The technique's validity depends entirely on how closely the paired sales actually match on every characteristic other than the one being isolated — in practice, truly clean pairs are rare in commercial real estate given how heterogeneous income properties are, so appraisers more often assemble several imperfect pairs and average or bracket the implied adjustment rather than relying on a single pair. Paired sales analysis is also referred to as 'matched pair analysis,' and its outputs feed directly into the adjustment grid — a dollar or percentage adjustment for location, for instance, extracted from one or more paired comparisons is the actual support an appraiser is expected to cite when defending a corresponding line-item adjustment in the sales comparison approach, rather than relying on unsupported appraiser judgment alone. Appraisal review commonly flags adjustment grids whose line-item adjustments cannot be traced back to any paired-sales or other market-derived support, since USPAP requires adjustments to be market-derived where the data allows it, not simply asserted.