“Real estate agents are more confident than ever that the comparative market analysis (CMA), a fundamentally human document, matters most in an increasingly automated industry. That’s the headline finding of the 2026 Survey of Best Practices for CMAs & Listing Presentations, released today by Giant Steps Advisors in partnership with Lone Wolf Technologies.
Back in 2020 my company W+R Studios did a survey of best practices for CMAs and listing presentations. I wondered what had changed in six years, so we decided to run the survey again, in partnership with Lone Wolf, and add a few new questions. We got responses from 2,165 U.S. real estate professionals across 46 states. One thing that jumped out at us: 89.6% said CMAs will be more relevant in the future, up from 67% in 2020. That 22-point jump is the biggest shift on any question in the survey.
Think about it: for twenty years people have been writing the CMA’s obituary. The Zestimate was going to kill it. iBuyers were going to kill it. Now AI is going to kill it.
Here’s what those predictions missed. More public data did NOT make sellers better calibrated. It made them more anchored, and more confident in a wrong number. Every appointment now starts with some version of “Zillow says my house is worth this much.” That’s the screenshot era. So the pricing conversation didn’t go away when data got cheap. It got harder. Look at the number: pricing as the #1 objection jumped from 52.7% to 63.7%. The flood of free numbers didn’t replace the professional who can interpret them. It created a bigger, harder problem that only a professional can solve. Scarcity of data was never the agent’s value. Judgment about data is.
You can download the full results of the survey here.
