I think there is a lot of manual work as well.
It's important to note however that people seem to ignore how hard is to get solid data from any part of domaining. The work that NB does is exceptional imo and errors are expected to happen.
Development has nothing to do with if it sold or not. Most sold names aren’t developed.
These two summed it up pretty well. There's obviously a lot of automation, but there's also quite a bit of manual work too, both in terms of adding and cleaning data. At the end of the day whether or not the domain ended up being developed has nothing to do with the legitimacy of a sale report.
That said, this is one of the most opaque industries I have ever seen. Very few marketplaces actually give us any data, it's very difficult to verify a sale especially post GDPR, and not many people take the time to share their private sales with the community. We do our best with the limited information that is available, but it definitely isn't perfect. Though I hope it's much better than nothing
Raymond has always been extremely helpful with telling us about duplicate entries, sales that didn't go through, etc. And I always act on those reports, and find some myself occasionally.
With Sedo, we track them through three methods. One is their feed of brokered sales, which Sedo manually curates and is highly accurate. The second is the monthly spreadsheet of $2k+ sales that their PR department sends around. This is also manual and very accurate.
The third is their auctions, which is where this particular report came from. We did notice that there were quite a few unusual/suspicious auctions at Sedo, the MO was usually a crazy price with a single bid. To deal with this, a while back we changed our tracking so that if it is a Sedo auction and the price is over $2k, we only track it if there were multiple bids. Otherwise we just wait to hear about it from their monthly report if it wasn't fake (and assuming neither party asks Sedo for privacy if it was legit). That definitely helped a lot, but this particular one had three bids and thus made it through.
I went ahead and removed it manually, after checking to see that it was not in the appropriate monthly spreadsheet from Sedo PR. It being absent from the report doesn't mean it didn't happen, as again one of the parties could have requested privacy, but that combined with the re-listing is suspect.