In September 2026, GetAgent surveyed 162 UK estate agents about overvaluing. Ninety-five percent said they had seen rivals provide what they believed were unrealistic valuations to win instructions, 67% said the practice had become more common over the previous year, and 89% said they had lost a potential instruction to a competitor offering a higher valuation.
Those figures are reported experience and opinion. They do not audit rival valuations and they do not prove that a higher number caused the seller's choice. But they describe a competitive pressure recognised by most of the agents in that survey. If the highest valuation helps an agent get through the door, the harder question is what happens afterwards.
What agents report
The same survey gives a useful picture of the perceived incentive. Thirty-three percent of respondents identified sellers favouring the agent with the highest valuation as the biggest factor encouraging overvaluing. Competition between agents followed at 28%, pressure to grow market share at 22%, and internal listing targets at 11%.
Eighty-nine percent also believed sellers place too much importance on the highest valuation when choosing an agent. Ninety-five percent believed initially overvaluing a property can damage a seller's chances of achieving the best outcome.
Again, those are the surveyed agents' views. Their value is not that they prove how every contested valuation works. They show the tension agents themselves describe: pressure to present an attractive number while believing that an unrealistic number can create problems later.
Why the incentive persists
A valuation figure is unusually easy for a seller to compare. Marketing quality, negotiation skill, judgement and transaction management are harder to assess before an instruction is signed. Three agents can describe broadly similar services; three asking-price recommendations produce three immediately comparable numbers.
That does not mean the highest figure reliably wins. The GetAgent survey does not establish that. It does explain why agents can feel pressure to stretch when they believe a rival will do the same.
The commercial problem is that the instruction is recorded immediately while the quality of the pricing decision becomes visible later. A listing can look like a win on the day it is signed even if the asking price is subsequently reduced.
What the pricing data shows
Separate Savills research reported in July 2026 found a strong association between initial pricing, subsequent reductions and time to an offer. Properties described as accurately priced at the outset reached an offer in around 28 days. Where one price reduction was required, the figure was around 100 days. With two or more reductions, it approached five and a half months.
Savills reported that 33% of sales required a reduction and 11% required two or more. The average reduction was 4.4% each time; properties reduced four times had fallen 15.4% in total from the initial asking price.
These figures are observational. They do not prove that an ambitious initial valuation, by itself, caused the longer marketing period or eventual reduction. Property type, local demand, wider market conditions and seller decisions can all affect the outcome. The evidence supports an association between repeated repricing and a more protracted sale, not a clean causal chain.
The highest valuation is not the outcome
Put the two datasets beside each other and the tension becomes clearer without pretending they measure the same thing. GetAgent records what agents say happens during competition for instructions. Savills records what is associated with properties that later require price reductions.
The first tells us that many agents perceive pressure around the valuation figure. The second tells us that repeated repricing is associated with much longer time to offer and progressively larger reductions. Neither proves that a particular instruction was won through overvaluation and then delayed because of it.
What they do challenge is the idea that winning the instruction is a sufficient measure of success. The asking price is a proposal to the market. The eventual outcome is what tests it.
Winning the instruction versus winning the right instruction
An instruction is visible immediately in a pipeline report. Its quality is not. A credible valuation, a seller prepared for the market and an agency with a realistic understanding of the seller's priorities may look identical in the CRM to an instruction won after a more optimistic conversation.
That makes overvaluation partly a judgement problem. If the contest is reduced to one comparable number, the number does more work than it should. A better conversation has to understand what the seller is actually trying to achieve, how fixed their timing is, what evidence they will accept and what trade-offs they are prepared to make.
The September survey does not tell an agency which seller will accept realistic advice. The Savills data does not tell it which seller will instruct. But together they make a narrower point worth keeping: the number that looks strongest at the valuation appointment is not the same thing as the outcome that will look strongest months later.