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A summer housing market that got off to a discouraging start for real estate agents appears to have regained its footing in July.
Agent respondents to the Intel Index survey in recent weeks reported healthier buyer pipelines than the month before, a finding that adds to an emerging picture of a mid-summer momentum shift based on market data and brokerage earnings calls reviewed by Intel for this report.
Parts of the picture remained mixed, particularly when it comes to listing clients. But the boost in buyers was enough to move Intel’s monthly Client Pipeline Tracker of agent sentiment back into narrowly positive territory.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in July: +2
- Previous score: –2 in June
- Recent high point: +9 in January
Chart by Daniel Houston
The market remains depressed overall, and agents remain less optimistic than they were in January and February. But the recent upward momentum is a welcome sign for brokerages after the initially weak start to real estate’s most crucial closing season.
Read the components that went into the score — and the nuggets from the nation’s biggest brokerage companies that tell a similar story — in this week’s report.
Back on track
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
June → July
- Present buyer pipelines: -33 → -28
- Future buyer pipelines: +6 → +12
- Present seller pipelines: -9 → -11
- Future seller pipelines: +9 → +12
We see here that the principal improvement in present-day conditions came on the buyer side of the equation.
- In June, 57 percent of agent respondents told Intel that their buyer pipelines were worse off than the same time last year. Fast-forward to July, and only 50 percent of respondents gave the same response.
Despite this, agents have not yet reported a reversal in their fortunes with listing clients, which continued a steady downward trend since spring began.
- 39 percent of agent respondents told Intel in July that their listing pipelines were worse off than last year’s around this time, up from 37 percent in June and 34 percent in February.
Still, in this rebalancing market, the focus for many agents is on the elusive buyer client. And the gains made in recent weeks in attracting buyers have resulted in an increasingly positive outlook for the year ahead, despite treading water with listing clients.
- Agent respondents who expect heavier buyer pipelines 12 months from now jumped from 34 percent in June to 43 percent in July, according to Intel surveys.
- And this improvement in sentiment even extended to their listing business as well: Agents were more likely to express optimism toward future listing pipelines in July than the month before, with 8 percent of all July respondents expecting that improvement to be “substantial,” compared to 3 percent the month before.
These survey results aren’t the only sign that the summer market took a turn for the better.
‘A strong growth picture’
Just last week, the leaders of the nation’s two largest brokerage companies both suggested that sales momentum had picked up in July, pointing to year-over-year increases in pending listings.
Ryan Schneider, the CEO of brokerage giant Anywhere, told investors on an earnings call that July saw a bigger year-over-year increase in closed and open sales volume, driven about equally by price and transaction growth.
“Together, this paints a strong growth picture for the back half of the year that we hope continues,” Schneider said on the call.
His counterpart at Compass painted a similar picture for pending contracts in July, which should provide a boost to closed sales by September.
“I think it can reflect some of the delayed demand from the spring market where tariffs were the focus in April and much of spring,” Compass CEO Robert Reffkin told investors on an earnings call.
While hard pending-sale numbers won’t be available for a few more weeks, an early Intel analysis of market data from Realtor.com suggests that more homes did in fact leave the market in July due to either a pending sale or delisting than did in June.
That’s an unusual pattern for this time of year, when the raw total of outflowing listings begins to dip slightly on its path to the slower fall and winter homebuying seasons.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was set to run from July 21-Aug. 4, 2025, and had received 412 responses by Friday morning. These results are preliminary and may be revised. 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.
