The first appraisal of my career was simple: I turned up, looked at the property, gave a price range, and the vendor either agreed or didn’t. There was no PropTrack on their phone. No Domain estimate to argue against. No Reddit thread on Sydney clearance rates open in another tab.

That world is gone. In 2026, almost every vendor I meet has done thirty to ninety minutes of homework before I knock on the door. They have a number in their head. Sometimes they share it upfront. Sometimes they wait to see what I say first, then push back.

This isn’t a bad thing. Informed vendors generally make better decisions and have more realistic expectations. The problem is the quality of the data they’re working with. PropTrack and Domain estimates are improving, but they still get coastal aspect wrong. They still miss strata structure issues. They still over-weight a single recent sale that may have been a family transfer at below-market price.

The trick is teaching yourself to ask, early in the meeting, what they’ve already looked at. Not in a defensive way. Just genuinely curious. Once you know whether they’re working from PropTrack alone, or from a CoreLogic report, or from comparing to their neighbour’s actual sale, you can tailor the rest of the conversation.

A few practical tips for newer agents reading this. Don’t dismiss their data. Acknowledge it, then add to it. Walk them through what the algorithm can’t see. Show them three or four genuinely comparable settlements that you’d weight differently than the platforms do. Be honest when their number is in the right zone.

Vendor reporting has changed too. Weekly inspection numbers and digital buyer engagement scores are the baseline expectation now. The vendors who came of age with home dashboards in every other part of their life expect the same from their property campaign. Agencies still sending PDFs are losing listings to ones running live portals.

The takeaway, after a few hundred of these conversations: the informed vendor is a better client. You just have to do more work to get to the same agreement.