As real estate agents gradually become more familiar with how the NAR settlement will impact business, they’re increasingly open to rosier possibilities, according to a new Intel analysis.
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It was no fluke.
The improvement in real estate client pipelines that agents reported in September has held up in the ensuing months and even made further gains, providing a meaningful boost to hopes for business revenue in the year to come.
These improving real estate agent attitudes, revealed by November’s Inman Intel Index survey, come in defiance of the trend in mortgage rates, which remain more than a half-point higher than they were when Intel last gauged industry sentiment.
Intel resumed its flagship industry survey this month after pausing in October in order to make way for a separate poll of Inman readers.
But the latest Intel Index responses from late November help confirm that the steep uptick in agent sentiment that occurred two months prior was no mere blip.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in November: -1
- Previous score: -5 in September
- Recent peak: +7 in January
Chart by Daniel Houston
This month’s Tracker metric is based on real estate agent responses to the Intel Index survey that was conducted from Nov. 18 through Dec. 4.
In this report, Intel explores the factors that have pushed agent sentiment from a low point in late May back into neutral territory in recent weeks.
Read the full breakdown of the latest Client Pipeline Tracker results.
Buyers test the waters
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, 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
September → November
- Present buyer pipelines: -37 → -30
- Future buyer pipelines: +7 → +6
- Present seller pipelines: -17 → -15
- Future seller pipelines: +7 → +13
Two things stand out right off the bat:
One, buyer pipeline activity is showing signs of life despite the overall increase in mortgage rates since late September.
- The share of agents who said their buyer pipelines worsened over the past 12 months was just under 53 percent in November, down from 59 percent two months before.
And two, agent attitudes toward their future listing prospects are tracking more closely with Federal Reserve policy than with the weekly ups and downs of mortgage rates themselves.
- The portion of agents who expect their listing pipelines to stay the same or improve over the next 12 months was 82 percent in November, up from 76 percent in the previous survey.
And although agent expectations for buyer pipelines over the next 12 months did not undergo a meaningful improvement from September, they remain near their highest levels since February, before the terms of the NAR settlement became public.
The journey here
In May, agents were at a low point.
By that point, the industry had had multiple months to process the implications of the NAR settlement changes — which caused agents to sharply lower their expectations for buyer pipelines over the coming 12 months.
Adding insult to injury, the spring homebuying season had already come in weaker than anticipated. And with continued delays in Federal Reserve rate cuts, agents resigned themselves to a slower market than once hoped in the summer and beyond.
Much of that came to pass as expected.
But by late November, the industry had passed another pair of critical inflection points: the NAR settlement rules going into effect in mid-August, and the Federal Reserve’s shift toward a rate-cutting era.
As real estate agents have gotten their heads around the implications of the rule changes and seen some clients in their markets return to the fold, their outlook for future business conditions has improved.
- As recently as late August, just days after the rule changes went into effect, more than 1 in 9 agent respondents to the Intel Index expressed deep pessimism about their buyer business in the year ahead.
- Two months later, the share of deeply pessimistic buyer agents had dropped to fewer than 1 in 16 agent respondents.
On the listing side, agents haven’t been quite as pessimistic, perhaps betting that even if rate cuts were coming on delay, they would still arrive eventually.
But a clear trend has emerged on the listing side as well: Agents who were on the fence about their listing pipelines in August have increasingly turned to optimism in recent weeks.
- 45 percent of agent respondents in August said they expected their listing pipelines to remain about the same in the year ahead, compared to 35 percent who expected them to improve.
- By late November, only 39 percent of agents expected listing pipelines to remain unchanged over the next 12 months, while 43 percent believed they would see year-over-year growth in their listing business.
To be sure, real estate professionals view the year ahead as filled with uncertainty — and some believe that there may be as many rough patches ahead as there were in 2024.
But since the NAR settlement details became public in March, agents are as open as they’ve been to the possibility that better days could be just around the corner.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was conducted Nov. 18-Dec. 4, 2024, and had received 751 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.
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