Appraisals are where listings are won. By the time you walk through the front door, the vendor has usually spoken to more than one agent, and the difference between a polished appraisal and a rushed one often comes down to how well you captured the property in the first place.
The Appraisal Wizard in iDashboard is built for that walkthrough. It lets you tag hundreds of property features as you move through the home, so the detail is recorded once, on the spot, and is ready to work for you afterwards — in your appraisal presentation, in your follow-up, and in the listing itself if you win the business.
Capture the property while you are standing in it
Most agents still take an appraisal on a notepad or in their phone’s notes app, then rebuild it back at the office. That rework costs time, and detail gets lost — the second bathroom’s fixtures, the lighting, the outlook from the rear deck, the shed that will matter to one particular buyer.
The Appraisal Wizard turns that into a structured walkthrough. You step through the property, tagging features as you go: rooms, finishes, inclusions, lighting, outdoor areas, parking and the practical attributes buyers filter on. Because you are selecting from defined options rather than typing free-form notes, everything you record is consistent and searchable later.
Two things follow from that. First, you leave the appraisal with a complete property record rather than a to-do list. Second, every agent in the office captures a property the same way, which makes appraisals comparable across your team.
Set the appraisal up properly
A few habits make the rest of the process far easier:
- Create the appraisal against the address, not a placeholder. Suburb and postcode autocomplete keeps the address clean, which matters if the property later goes live on the portals.
- Record the Appraisal Price. This is the figure you discussed with the owner. Keeping it in the record gives you a reference point when the market moves or the conversation resumes months later.
- Link the owner as a contact. Appraisals are relationships, not one-off events. With the owner in your database, the appraisal becomes part of their history rather than a standalone document.
- Be generous with photos. Even quick phone shots taken during the walkthrough are useful for your presentation and for briefing a photographer later.
Follow up without relying on memory
Very few appraisals convert on the day. The agents who win the listing are usually the ones who stay in touch in a genuinely useful way over the following weeks and months.
This is where Action Plans earn their keep. You can trigger a plan for an appraisal contact that schedules the calls, emails and check-ins you know work — a thank you and market summary in the first few days, a comparable sale when one lands nearby, a seasonal touch point before spring. The plan does the remembering; you do the conversation.
Reporting closes the loop at an office level. The Appraisals Report and Lead Properties report let a principal or sales manager see what has been appraised, by whom, and what is still open. That turns appraisal activity into something you can actually manage in a sales meeting, rather than a number people estimate from memory.
When you win the listing
The real payoff comes at conversion. Because the appraisal already holds the address, the owner, the features and the price discussion, taking it to a live listing is a continuation rather than a re-entry. The Duplicate Wizard carries the details across, including the appraisal price as your starting point, so your admin team is checking and refining a record instead of building one from scratch.
From there the rest of your real estate CRM takes over. The property details flow into your print marketing — window cards, handouts and brochures — and into your portal uploads, where a listing loaded once can be uploaded to 82 supported websites and portals, with any later changes detected and pushed automatically. The same data also flows through to your agency website if it is built by iDashsites or hosted with iProperty.
Your vendor gets visibility from day one too. You provide them with a live vendor report link at the start of the campaign, and they can check enquiry and activity whenever they like, always up to date.
A simple audit for your office
If appraisals are being tracked inconsistently across your team, three questions are worth asking at your next sales meeting:
- Is every appraisal being created in iDashboard, including the ones that did not convert?
- Is the appraisal price being recorded, so you can see how your assessments track against the market?
- Does every appraisal contact go onto a follow-up plan, or does follow-up depend on whoever remembers?
Tightening those three things usually costs nothing and quietly lifts conversion, because it means no appraisal is ever a dead end.
Need a hand?
If you would like a walkthrough of the Appraisal Wizard or help setting up appraisal follow-up plans for your office, our support team can help — it is complimentary for all users. Give us a call on 1800 432 742 or get in touch through idashboard.com.au.
