A seller agrees on a price. Then the buyer looks up the property online and finds an estimate that says it is worth less.
Now the negotiation has a third voice.
The seller calls. The buyer wants to know why they should pay more. And the agent is suddenly defending their advice against a number they did not create and cannot control.
The temptation is to fight it. Explain why the estimate is wrong. Find better comparable sales. Try to have it changed. Tell the vendor it does not reflect what their property is really worth.
But by the time that conversation is happening, the estimate has already done its job.
The buyer has seen it. The vendor has seen it. And the agent is responding to a piece of information that someone else introduced into the conversation.
There is a better place to win that argument.
Before the appraisal.
The estimate is beaten before the appraisal
Most future sellers do not wake up one morning and immediately book an appraisal.
They research first.
They watch what properties around them are selling for. They notice the house down the street go under contract. They open suburb reports, market updates and property emails. They start paying more attention to anything that might tell them what their own home is worth.
Eventually, many will find an online estimate.
But the estimate does not have to be the first piece of property advice they encounter.
For an agent, that period before the appraisal is an opportunity to establish the context through which the homeowner understands the market.
If they have regularly received useful information about recent local sales, changing buyer conditions and what is happening in their suburb, the online estimate arrives as one piece of information among many.
If they have heard nothing from an agent for months or years, the estimate may become the starting point instead.
That distinction matters.
Because by the time a homeowner requests an appraisal, they may already have formed expectations about their property's value, researched local agents and started deciding whose advice they trust.
The agent who has been useful throughout that process is not starting the appraisal conversation from zero.
They have already been part of it.
What being present actually looks like
Being present does not mean flooding a database with generic emails.
It means consistently giving homeowners reasons to pay attention.
A recent sale around the corner. A meaningful change in local market conditions. New competing stock. An explanation of what buyers are responding to. Evidence that helps someone understand what is happening to property values in their area.
For a homeowner who is months away from selling, those touchpoints might seem small.
Together, they build context.
By the time that homeowner starts seriously researching their property's value, they have already seen evidence of the agent's local activity and market knowledge.
That is where consistency matters.
The challenge, of course, is producing and sending useful content regularly across an entire database while agents are also listing, selling, prospecting and managing clients.
iRealty helps make that ongoing communication manageable, with done-for-you property content, market updates and database communication designed to keep agents relevant to homeowners between transactions.
The objective is not to predict the exact day somebody decides to sell.
It is to make sure the relationship does not begin on that day.
Because if the first meaningful interaction a homeowner has about their property's value is an online estimate, the number gets to establish the starting point.
If an agent has already been providing useful local evidence, there is context around it.
The signals behind seller intent
There is another advantage to staying consistently present.
Homeowners leave signals.
Someone who has ignored property emails for months may suddenly start opening local sales updates. Another contact might click through repeatedly to recent listings. Someone else may become noticeably more engaged with seller-focused content.
None of those behaviours guarantees a listing.
But together, they can indicate that a homeowner's interest is changing.
That matters because the traditional trigger for an agent to act is often the appraisal request itself.
By then, the homeowner may have spent weeks researching prices, checking online estimates and looking at competing agents.
Engagement gives agents an opportunity to recognise interest earlier.
iRealty helps surface those behaviour-based signals within an agent's database, making it easier to identify contacts who are becoming more engaged and focus attention where seller intent may be strengthening.
That changes the timing of the conversation.
Instead of waiting for a homeowner to raise their hand after they have done all their research, an agent has an opportunity to become useful while that research is happening.
A relevant conversation about a nearby sale or a change in local conditions can happen before the homeowner starts interviewing agents.
And that may be the real defence against the third voice.
Not finding a better way to argue with an estimate.
Making sure the estimate is not the first credible voice the homeowner hears.
And if the number still shows up mid-campaign
Of course, getting there earlier does not make online estimates disappear.
A buyer can still find one during a campaign. A family member can still send the vendor a link. A number can still appear that conflicts with the price the agent and vendor have discussed.
When that happens, the answer is not to dismiss it.
"It's just an algorithm" might feel like the obvious response, but it does little to make the number less persuasive.
To a vendor, the estimate can look independent. To a buyer, it can feel like evidence supporting their position. The harder an agent argues against it, the easier it becomes for the conversation to turn into the agent's opinion versus the number on the screen.
Instead, acknowledge it and give it context.
An online estimate is one piece of evidence. The live campaign is producing another.
Recent comparable sales, current competing properties, inspection activity, buyer feedback, offers and changes in local conditions all contribute information about what the market is prepared to do now.
That is particularly important when conditions are moving quickly.
An estimate does not necessarily need to be "wrong" to create a misleading impression. It may simply be working from information that does not fully reflect what is happening in the market today.
So if the estimate and the live campaign tell different stories, the conversation should not become an argument about which one is right.
It should become a conversation about which evidence is most current and relevant to that particular property.
The same principle applies when an estimate supports the agent's advice.
If buyer feedback has consistently pointed in one direction, competing properties have shifted and offers are falling short of expectations, an online estimate that tells a similar story can add another piece of evidence to a difficult vendor conversation.
But consistency matters.
You cannot dismiss an estimate when it challenges your advice and treat it as gospel when it supports it.
The line to hold is simple:
Never let the estimate set the price, but never pretend it does not exist.
Treat it the same way you would any other piece of market evidence. Consider it alongside current buyer behaviour, comparable sales, competing stock, the individual property and the vendor's circumstances.
Sometimes it will support the vendor's position.
Sometimes it will challenge it.
Either way, the agent's value is not having a better number.
It is having the context to interpret all the numbers.
Own the context before the number appears
Online estimates are not going away.
Homeowners will keep checking them. Buyers will keep finding them. And sometimes those numbers will enter a negotiation at exactly the wrong moment.
Agents cannot control that.
What they can control is everything that happens before it.
Stay present in the database. Give homeowners useful local evidence before they are ready to sell. Pay attention when their engagement starts to change. Start relevant conversations earlier.
Then, when an online estimate eventually appears, it is not competing with a relationship that began five minutes ago.
It is one more piece of information inside a conversation the agent has already earned the right to lead.