Author: Sara Winstone

When Lightstone took South Africa’s first Automated Valuation Model (AVM) live with Absa in 2006, most banks assumed that automated valuations would be useful for low-value, low-risk decisions, but never as a serious substitute for a human valuer walking the property.  Twenty years later, AVMs sit at the centre of mortgage origination, portfolio monitoring and capital management at every major South African lender. That is the story most people would tell about the last two decades. I think it’s the wrong story. A market once shaped by scarcity of information is defined in 2026 by an abundance of data. Information asymmetry has collapsed, decision-making has become smarter, faster and more defensible. Property intelligence influences more than transactions alone. The real shift, then, hasn’t been the…