The instruction was already decided before the valuation

The data

In a September 2026 GetAgent survey of 162 UK estate agents, 95% said they had seen rivals provide what they believed were unrealistic valuations. Eighty-nine percent said they had lost a potential instruction to a competitor offering a higher number, and 67% said overvaluing to win instructions had become more common over the previous twelve months. These figures record the surveyed agents' reported experience and views; they are not an audited measure of valuation behaviour across the market.

Ninety-five percent of those surveyed also said that initially overvaluing a property could damage a seller's chances of achieving the best outcome. That is the respondents' assessment of the risk, rather than direct evidence of the eventual outcomes of those listings.

When asked why overvaluing persisted, agents pointed to three pressures: sellers favouring the highest valuation (33%), competition between agencies (28%), and internal listing targets (22%). The incentives are misaligned, and the market has responded accordingly.

The wrong battle

The overvaluing debate assumes the valuation meeting is where instructions are won or lost. The agent who arrives with the most flattering number takes the board. The agent who gives an honest assessment loses it. That framing is accurate as far as it goes, but it describes a battle that begins too late.

Agents who compete on valuation price are competing for sellers who have already decided to move. They are fighting over the instruction at the point of appointment. The question of which sellers are worth that fight, which ones carry genuine intent to instruct in the near term, which ones are genuinely ready to sell, gets answered before any agent walks through the door.

Colby Short, co-founder and CEO of GetAgent, put it plainly: it is naturally tempting for a vendor to choose the agent promising the biggest number, and that creates an increasingly competitive environment where agents offering realistic, evidence-led advice can lose the instruction. The framing is right about the dynamic but stops short of naming the upstream problem. The valuation meeting is a late-stage event. Whether it is worth attending, and how much resource to invest in winning it, is determined by something that happened earlier: the enquiry.

What the valuation cannot see

Eighty-three percent of agents in the GetAgent survey selected one of three performance measures as what sellers should prioritise when choosing an agent: the percentage of asking price achieved, track record of selling similar properties locally, and average time taken to sell. All three are backward-looking. They measure what an agent has done. None of them describe what the seller is about to do.

A seller enquiring about a valuation is not a uniform signal. One is relocating for work and needs to be out within three months. Another is loosely curious about whether now is a good time. A third is a landlord weighing whether to sell a rental property. They arrive in the same inbox. They generate the same administrative response. They receive the same valuation appointment.

An inflated valuation can win attention at the appraisal stage, but the survey does not establish what happens to those listings afterwards. The more useful operational question is earlier: did the agency recognise which enquiries carried stronger evidence of a near-term decision before the valuation conversation began?

The enquiry stage is where the decision forms

The seller's decision to instruct is not made in the valuation room. It begins forming at the point of first contact. The signals that indicate genuine intent, urgency, timeline, and readiness to move are present in the initial enquiry. They are rarely extracted.

Agencies that treat every inbound enquiry as equivalent, routing them into a queue and responding in arrival order, are making a resource allocation decision by default. The choice of which sellers to prioritise gets deferred to the valuation stage, where the only visible lever left is the number on the appraisal.

Pulsero's argument is that the valuation meeting should not be the first point at which an agency distinguishes between seller situations. Reading the enquiry earlier gives the team more evidence about timing, motivation and commitment before deciding how to allocate attention.

Pulsero classifies inbound seller enquiries by instruction likelihood before they reach a negotiator, so agencies know which sellers are worth competing for before they decide how hard to compete.