This report is available exclusively to subscribers of Inman Intel, the data and research arm of Inman offering deep insights and market intelligence on the business of residential real estate and proptech. Subscribe today.

A weaker-than-expected lineup of buyer clients to open real estate’s most crucial closing season forced agents to downgrade their outlook for the year ahead, a new Intel survey shows.

The share of agent respondents to June’s Inman Intel Index survey who said they experienced a year-over-year decline in buyer pipelines rose from 52 percent in May to 57 percent in June, according to the latest results.

And that helped push overall agent sentiment to its lowest point since September, as measured by Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker metric.

Client Pipeline Tracker score in June: -2

• Previous score: +2 in May
• Recent high point: +9 in January

Short-term listing client conditions remained mostly unchanged as the page turned to summer and an inventory recovery continued apace. Still, the agents Intel surveyed had substantially scaled back on their optimism for future business on both sides of the transaction.

This week’s report breaks down all the survey components that inform the score — and lays out what they mean for the months ahead.

A weak start to summer

Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker is a compilation of how agents feel about their buyer and seller pipelines — both over the past year and in the near future.

Intel described the methodology in this post, but here’s a quick refresher on how to interpret the scores.

• A score of 0 represents a neutral period in which client pipelines are neither improving nor worsening.
• A positive score reflects a market in which client pipelines have been improving, or are widely expected to improve in the next 12 months. The higher the rating, the more confident agents are in that conditions are moving in a positive direction.
• A negative score suggests client pipeline conditions are worsening, or are widely expected to get worse in the year to come.

An extremely positive combined score falls somewhere around the +20 mark. This type of score would signify that much of the industry is in agreement with the fact that pipelines are improving and will continue to improve.

An extremely negative combined score, on the other hand, falls closer to -20. That’s a bit lower than where the industry stood in September 2024, the first time Intel surveyed agents about their pipelines.

For each of the four individual components that go into the score, results as high as +50 or as low as -50 are sometimes observed.

Here are the component scores from the most recent survey, and how each sentiment category changed from the previous one.

Tracker component scores

May → June

1. Present buyer pipelines: -27 → -33
2. Future buyer pipelines: +11 → +6
3. Present seller pipelines: -9 → -9
4. Future seller pipelines: +13 → +9

Summer is supposed to be the season where agents close on the highest volume of transactions — and secure the biggest chunk of their revenues for the year.

And while that seasonal ramp-up is likely happening, the momentum has not been as strong as agents are accustomed to at this time of year.

• 24 percent of agent respondents described buyer pipeline declines from last June that were “substantial” in scope, while another 33 percent described more moderate hits to buyer-side client pools.
• The previous month, fewer than 21 percent of respondents told Intel they observed “substantial” year-over-year declines in their buyer pipelines, and another 31 percent said they experienced a smaller fall.

These buyer-side struggles coincided with declining outlooks for the year ahead.

• On the buyer side, the share of agents who told Intel that they expected to be working with more clients 12 months from now fell from 40 percent in May to 34 percent in June.
• The seller-side trend was even more pronounced, with 44 percent of agent respondents in May expressing optimism for their listing pipelines in the year ahead, and just under 37 percent doing the same in June.

But for many of these agents, the optimism wasn’t replaced with pure pessimism, but with more of a wait-and-see stance.

• The share of agent respondents who said they expect their buyer pipelines to be “about the same” a year from now crept up from 43 percent in May to 46 percent in June.
• Meanwhile, seller pipelines were expected to remain about the same 12 months from now by 46 percent of respondents in June, up from 38 percent the month before.

Where the market stands

Despite this relatively weak start to real estate’s busy season, agents are still more or less treading water with their listing clients amid a slow but steady climb in inventory.

• Drawing from both ends of the spectrum, the share of agents in June who told Intel that their listing client pools were “about the same” as last year rose from 27 percent in May to 34 percent in June.

As a result, the present condition of listing pipelines were the only component of the Client Pipeline Tracker that didn’t meaningfully worsen in the early weeks of summer.

These results come in the context of a general rising tide of new listings that have served as a silver lining to the nation’s ongoing depressed sales environment.

But as Intel explored a few weeks ago, many markets have yet to fully participate in that recovery, including many large metros sprawling throughout the Midwest and Northeast.

As the market recovery enters a distinct new chapter, Intel will continue to closely follow these and other trends.

Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was conducted June 21-July 3, 2025, and received 522 responses. The entire Inman reader community was invited to participate, and a rotating, randomized selection of community members was prompted to participate by email. Users responded to a series of questions related to their self-identified corner of the real estate industry — including real estate agents, brokerage leaders, lenders and proptech entrepreneurs. Results reflect the opinions of the engaged Inman community, which may not always match those of the broader real estate industry. This survey is conducted monthly.

Email Daniel Houston

This report is available exclusively to subscribers of Inman Intel, the data and research arm of Inman offering deep insights and market intelligence on the business of residential real estate and proptech. Subscribe today.

It’s been a rough few years for brokerages in densely packed employment centers.

As if it’s not enough that urban housing markets missed out on some of the windfall from the early pandemic housing boom, their suburbs have continued to outperform them in sales, new supply and price support amid the ensuing transaction downturn, an Intel data analysis of thousands of ZIP codes suggests.

TAKE THE INMAN INTEL SURVEY FOR JUNE

This analysis contributes to a deeper understanding of how the U.S. housing market’s replenishing supply of inventory, long hoped-for by real estate agents, has been a mixed bag for the brokerage world.

It also highlights how a split in buyer-seller dynamics is more than just a regional story — it’s an in-market divide that’s deeply felt within the nation’s most prominent metro areas.

The full list of insights is available to Intel subscribers.

Intel’s approach

For this analysis, Intel analyzed ZIP-code-level data from Realtor.com for each of the nation’s largest metropolitan population centers. The ZIP codes were then placed in buckets according to government definitions of the rural and suburban areas that surround a metro’s urban core, and the urban core itself.

This exercise might not match everyone’s definition of suburb. 

By the government’s definition, municipalities like Beverly Hills, Pasadena and Long Beach, for example, are not treated as suburbs but are instead considered part of the Los Angeles urban core.

You have to reach as far out as Santa Clarita — which has a significant share of residents who brave an hour-plus southeast commute into L.A. — to see a significant population center categorized as a high-commute suburb by this government definition.

Still, the suburbs that are considered part of a metro’s “urban core” likely share some of the dynamics of the outer suburbs and exurbs, in addition to some dynamics of more densely packed downtowns and neighborhoods further in.

An urban-driven rebalancing

A couple weeks ago, Intel explored the stark regional split that has divided the country as its housing markets rebalance in favor of buyers. 

Markets throughout much of the South and West of the country have rapidly reached a point where they are more buyer-friendly than they had been before the pandemic. Markets in the Northeast and Midwest, on the other hand, are rebalancing more slowly, and remain more seller-leaning than they were before the pandemic.

This week’s analysis reveals that another split is occurring within individual markets. 

• The urban cores of major metro areas have seen activity levels on the typical listing drop by 21 percent year-over-year, outpacing the 17 percent decline in metro suburbs over the same period. 
• This leaves outflow activity in urban cores 15 percent lower as a percentage of total listings than it was before the pandemic, compared to a 5 percent decline in suburbs. 

At first glance, we might expect this to mean that this fast-paced rebalancing of urban-center markets implies that big cities are also leading the way in new-listing inflow. But interestingly, that’s not the case.

• Urban core ZIP codes have notched 8 percent growth year-over-year in the number of new listings coming online, but that only brings them just within 19 percent of their prepandemic new-listing levels.
• Meanwhile, commuting suburbs have seen new-listing inflow that’s 10 percent higher year over year. And because their new-listing activity had already weathered the pandemic years better than urban cores, these suburbs are now just outside of 7 percent below where they stood before the pandemic.

So what does this all mean?

For dense urban population centers constituting a great bulk of real estate activity in the U.S., the Great Rebalancing has been caused by an unhealthy combination of depressed sales activity that’s been outpaced by a still-tepid boost in new inventory.

This has allowed big-city markets to rebalance in favor of buyers without experiencing a particularly robust recovery in new-listing opportunities for brokerages.

The suburban boom, revisited

There’s no doubt that urban and suburban markets alike have cooled.

But if dense urban employment centers have undergone a more passive rebalancing in the last few years, their in-commuting suburbs have done so in a way that’s allowed them to remain hotter for longer, and produce more returns for the real estate industry.

• Total listing outflow — a metric that tracks closely with pending-sales trends — is up 6 percent year-over-year in suburbs, compared to only up 4 percent in the major urban centers they feed into. 

But this understates just how much better off suburban housing markets are in terms of transaction levels.

• Even in this down market, listing outflow in suburbs is now back within 15 percent of pre-pandemic norms for the group of markets Intel reviewed.
• Urban cores, on the other hand, still lag their pre-pandemic outflow levels by 25 percent.

New construction has doubtless been part of the picture.

Far-out suburbs tend to have more undeveloped land to build out, and often come with fewer local hurdles to clear on zoning and permitting. This ensures a steadier access to one key source of new supply.

But that’s not the only reason why the suburbs are still faring better than their urban counterparts.

• List prices in high-commuting suburbs remain 52 percent higher than where they stood before the pandemic housing era reshaped the real estate market. Low-commuting exurbs remain on an even higher perch, at 61 percent above normal price levels.
• But the fact that urban pandemic price gains of 39 percent have failed to keep up with their outlying communities despite weaker new-inventory trends suggests that suburbs simply remain hotter in the eyes of buyers and sellers.

For brokerages, the bottom line is clear: The suburban and exurban growth patterns that were so game-changing in the early pandemic — as remote work reshaped people’s choices of how to work and where to live — remain partly intact, even as the market has cooled.

To examine this, Intel used a rough estimate of the potential commission pool available to brokerages. The estimate used listing outflow levels as a rough proxy for sales, then multiplied that value by the typical list price for each area.

• Brokerages only had about 4 percent more potential commission revenue to earn this spring from deals in urban areas than they did in pre-pandemic years. That wasn’t even close to making up for the value lost to inflation in that time.
• But even after their own substantial dip in sales activity, high-commuting suburban communities produce 29 percent more in potential revenue for brokerages than they did before the pandemic struck, roughly double the rate of inflation in that time. 

Email Daniel Houston

This report is available exclusively to subscribers of Inman Intel, the data and research arm of Inman offering deep insights and market intelligence on the business of residential real estate and proptech. Subscribe today.

As the spring market built up momentum ahead of real estate’s busiest season, buyer’s agents found their rates increasingly squeezed from multiple angles, new Intel survey results suggest.

The large majority of agents surveyed each month as part of the Intel Index survey continue to say that their commissions have not changed, or have declined only slightly, since the NAR settlement rules went into effect in August.

TAKE THE INMAN INTEL SURVEY FOR JUNE

But the share of agent respondents who have been spared of negotiations with buyers has steadily eroded since the start of the year, the May survey results show. And more agents are dealing with sellers who want to attempt a hard strategy of not paying the buyer commission, Intel found.

Taken together, the results paint a picture of a market where an ongoing downward tug on commissions continues to strengthen, a reality with limited short-term impact but unknown long-term consequences.

Intel breaks down the findings in this week’s report.

Rising exposure

In late August, the first weeks after the National Association of Realtors settlement rules went into effect, roughly 3 in 4 agents said they hadn’t yet dealt with any buyers or sellers trying to take advantage of the new rules to drive a hard bargain.

Today, fewer agents are fully insulated from the change.

The first shift happened from August to September, as more buyers and sellers wrapped their heads around their options.

But Intel has observed a more recent shift in buyer behavior as well, coinciding with the start of the spring season and continuing through the most recent May results.

Intel: Over the last 3 months, what portion of your prospective buyer clients tried to negotiate a lower commission than what has been traditionally paid to buyer’s agents in your market?

December survey % → May survey %

• 66% → 57%: None tried to negotiate below the typical range
• 19% → 26%: Some, but fewer than 10%
• 9% → 10%: More than 10%, but fewer than half
• 6% → 7%: More than half tried to negotiate below the typical range

As we can see above, the share of agents who have no exposure to commission negotiation in recent months has dropped to a little over half of recent survey respondents.

Still, for the vast majority of survey respondents, these negotiations with buyers remain rare — making up fewer than 1 in 10 of the buyer clients with whom they ended up doing business.

For 17 percent of agent respondents, however, buyer negotiations have increasingly become a fact of life, affecting a significant share of their clients.

Intel also found evidence that sellers have taken the spring market as an opportunity to benefit from the new rules.

Intel: Over the last 3 months, what portion of your seller clients actually took a hard-line approach against covering the buyer’s agent commission?

December survey % → May survey %

• 74% → 64%: None
• 19% → 25%: Some, but fewer than 10%
• 2% → 6%: More than 10%, but fewer than half
• 4% → 5%: More than half

Here, too, we see that more agents have had experience with listing clients who were dead-set against the longstanding U.S. real estate practice of covering the buyer’s agent commission.

While these cases remain rare, it’s clear that the practice is not going away any time soon, even as agents largely advise their sellers against taking a route that might hurt their listing’s appeal on the market.

And the overall effect of these changes on commission rates? Not much, at least for most agents.

• Just over 47 percent of agent respondents in May said that they have observed no change to commission rates in their markets since the rules went into effect, and another 33 percent described the decline as slight.
• Only 5 percent of agent respondents told Intel that their compensation rates had decreased “significantly.”
• That’s even fewer than the 7 percent who said they have been able to negotiate higher rates as a result of the changes.

Intel will continue to monitor these trends in the months to come.

Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was conducted May 20-June 3, 2025, and received 529 responses. The entire Inman reader community was invited to participate, and a rotating, randomized selection of community members was prompted to participate by email. Users responded to a series of questions related to their self-identified corner of the real estate industry — including real estate agents, brokerage leaders, lenders and proptech entrepreneurs. Results reflect the experience of the engaged Inman community, which may not always match those of the broader real estate industry. This survey is conducted monthly.

Email Daniel Houston

This is a monthly breakdown of national market data powered by Inman Market View. The goal: to put more local data in the hands of the Inman community, and to place it in a context that’s highly relevant for the U.S. brokerage industry. 

Brokerage revenues made sneaky gains over the past year even as a rising tide of new listings — not a decline in sales — continued to erode the homeseller’s once-intractable negotiating edge.

The pool of potential commissions available to real estate brokerages was 4 percent higher this spring than it was during the same period last year, according to an Inman Market View analysis of listing data from Realtor.com.

These revenue gains were made possible by home prices that were bid up to unprecedented heights in the early pandemic real estate boom, then proved durable even through the subsequent downturn in transactions.

But notably, the spring market, which officially makes way for summer on Friday, also blew past a significant milestone: For the first time, the demand for the typical home listing has dropped below where it was in a typical pre-pandemic spring. 

SEE HOW A BOOM IN NEW SUPPLY HAS TRANSFORMED DENVER

The result? A national environment that is still admittedly seller-friendly, but the least seller-friendly it’s been since well before the pandemic housing era.

And the elevated price levels that have supported agent income for years could become a casualty in many markets as inventory further rebalances.

A healthier path — and a looming risk

To understand where real estate stands right now, it’s essential to place data in context of where it stood before record-low mortgage rates and a pandemic-fueled demand boom completely warped the contours of the market.

But first, let’s take an extra close look at how the business has evolved in the last year alone.

Change in March-May levels, year-over-year

• New listings: +9%
• Listing outflow: +4%
• Weighted list price: +0.1%
• Potential commission pool: +4%

We see here the reason behind the buyer-friendly shift in most parts of the country: Not a decline in listing outflow — which is Inman’s proxy for sales activity — but a bump in new listings that outpaced a more modest increase in transactions.

From a brokerage-business perspective, this represents a healthier path through a rebalancing period than what happened in 2022, when the primary driver of the inventory shift was a precipitous drop in home sales.

Still, despite the recent replenishing of inventory, the national market is a far cry from normal. 

As every real estate agent is painfully aware, mortgage rates remain elevated far above the rates most homeowners have locked in on their existing loans, and also well above the rate levels that made today’s price levels affordable for buyers.

Zooming out, we see how distorted the market remains compared to what we thought of as “normal” before the pandemic housing boom.

Change in March-May levels, vs. pre-pandemic baseline

Spring 2024 → Spring 2025

• New listings: -23% → -16%
• Listing outflow: -26% → -23%
• Weighted list price: +47% → +48%
• Potential commission pool: +10% → +14%

For the most part, price growth during the pandemic has held up even amid the downturn in sales, allowing many brokerages to weather the sales drought.

But it’s worth noting that while the raw value of the commission pool is technically higher than in the spring seasons of 2017-19, consumer-price inflation over that same period has more than offset these nominal gains. This means that in real terms, brokerage earnings are still worth less today than they were six years ago.

And downward pressure on prices may only be beginning.

The level of transaction activity on a typical active listing was 16 percent above pre-pandemic levels in spring of 2024. Even though the market had already substantially rebalanced by this point, this ensured that most markets remained deep seller’s markets.

This spring, the typical listing saw 7 percent less demand than it did pre-pandemic — taking substantial pressure off prices in the process.

As a national matter, the rebalancing toward buyers isn’t complete. After all, we were in a national seller’s market long before the pandemic. 

But it does appear to be entering a new era — one where today’s buyers have a noticeably more prominent place at the table.

Email Daniel Houston