The agent who says your house is worth the most clearly knows the market best.
Most sellers reach this conclusion the moment three appraisals arrive forty to sixty thousand dollars apart. On the surface it tracks. A sharper read on the market should produce a bigger, more defensible number, so the agent with the highest figure must be the one who understands the property best.
The Gap Between Appraisals That Nobody Questions
When a seller gathers three appraisals for the same property, the results are rarely a tight cluster around one figure. The spread is frequently wide enough that at least one number cannot be close to right. Sellers seldom stop to consider which. Trust tends to default to the biggest figure offered, largely because it lines up with what the seller wanted to hear in the first place.
An appraisal does double duty. It functions as a valuation, but it is also, whether the agent admits it or not, a pitch for the listing itself. Two agents can inspect the same property, look at the same comparable sales, and still land on figures tens of thousands apart, because one is pricing the house and the other is pricing the chance to win the seller over. Sellers who grasp this early tend to interview agents very differently For sellers wanting a clearer picture of how this plays out locally go here is worth a look before that first meeting. Either way, the pattern tends to hold regardless of which agent a seller speaks to first.
Why the Highest Number Is not the Most Accurate One
An agent quoting a high figure is not necessarily demonstrating superior market knowledge. Often they are demonstrating a willingness to tell the seller what they want to hear in order to win the mandate. This is not always deliberate deception. Some agents genuinely believe their optimistic number, at least until the campaign runs and the market fails to agree with them. Either way, the seller ends up choosing an agent based on a number that was never really about the market at all.
The hard part is that this rarely becomes clear until well into the campaign, once several weeks have passed without the interest that the initial appraisal had implied would show up. A closer look at how this plays out shows the pattern clearly Anyone weighing up how much to trust an early appraisal read the full article puts some useful structure around this decision. It rarely changes the fundamentals, but it can save a seller from finding out the hard way.
What a Genuinely Defensible Appraisal Looks Like
The appraisals worth trusting are rarely the ones stated with the most enthusiasm. They are the ones supported by specific comparable sales, recent settlement data, and an honest account of what buyers have actually paid for similar properties nearby in recent months. An agent who can walk through the evidence behind their number is doing something fundamentally different to one who simply asserts a figure with confidence. Confidence of delivery and accuracy of number are not the same thing, and sellers who cannot tell the difference tend to select for the wrong one.
There is a simple test for this. An agent with a genuinely defensible number can usually name the specific sales they are comparing against, within a reasonable timeframe and a comparable location. An agent relying mainly on optimism tends to speak in generalities about the market being strong, without pointing to anything specific that supports the figure they have just quoted.
The property is not the problem here. The appraisal process is.
The Questions Sellers Should Be Asking Instead
The question worth asking is rarely who thinks the property is worth the most. It is closer to: who has a defensible strategy for reaching genuine market value, and who is prepared to have an honest conversation if the campaign does not move at the quoted figure straight away. The track record of an agent on this specific point, how they have handled properties that needed a price adjustment mid-campaign, tends to reveal far more than any single number offered at the first meeting.
This is also where a direct question tends to teach a seller the most. An agent willing to talk through what happens if the opening weeks do not go to plan is behaving very differently to one who has only ever discussed the upside.
Common Questions About Agent Appraisals
Why does the same property get such different appraisal figures from different agents?
Appraisals combine genuine market judgement with an incentive to win the listing, and different agents weigh those two things differently. The spread between quotes often reflects that incentive as much as it reflects the property itself. An agent under pressure to secure new business has a reason to lean optimistic that has nothing to do with the comparable sales in the area.
Does the largest appraisal figure ever turn out to be accurate?
Sometimes, but the trust should come from the evidence supporting it, not from its size. A high figure grounded in genuine comparable sales is an entirely different thing to one pitched purely to win the listing, and the only reliable way to tell them apart is to ask what the number is actually based on.
Instead of asking for a number, what should sellers actually ask?
Asking what evidence sits behind the figure, and what the agent plans to do if the property does not attract offers at that price early on, tends to reveal far more than the number ever could. It also tends to separate the agents willing to defend their number from the ones hoping nobody asks.
Does a lower appraisal mean a worse agent?
Not necessarily. A lower, well-supported figure from an agent who can walk through the comparable sales behind it is often a stronger signal than a higher figure with no evidence attached. Sellers who filter agents purely on the size of the number they quote are optimising for the wrong variable entirely.
Rather than a true measurement of the house, an appraisal is really an opening bid for the listing itself, and sellers who recognise this early tend to choose very differently to those chasing the highest figure. Across the Gawler District and the northern Adelaide corridor, where the spread between agent appraisals can be just as wide as elsewhere in Adelaide, this distinction matters more rather than less, given how fast a mispriced campaign can lose momentum where comparable listings surface close together.