Measuring Product Quality Using Images: The CLIP Q-Score and an Application to Real Estate

The CLIP Q-score is a novel, safe, fully reproducible, and computationally efficient method for extracting objective product quality metrics from visual data using contrastive language-image pre-training. We introduce the technique and provide an extensive application to real estate data from an online platform (~500,000 images). Our open-source metric aligns with LLM assessments and proves to be a powerful predictor of housing market prices for both sales and rentals. We also show that a higher CLIP Q-store is associated with better liquidity (reduced time on the market), especially for properties on sale.