At the beginning of each of the past two years, the struggling real estate industry hummed with cautious optimism that a turnaround might finally be underway.
Both times, real-world conditions swiftly silenced this hopeful outlook.
But unlike this time last year, agents in August were increasingly thinking that the stage could be set for a quicker pace of recovery in the year ahead, according to Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker.
This tracking metric combines early insights into client pipelines from hundreds of real estate agents each month into a single score to help track business sentiment over time. And for the past few months, at least, that score’s been trending back up.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in August: +5
- Previous score: +1 in July
- Recent low point: -2 in June
Chart by Daniel Houston
The monthly survey of real estate agents and brokerage leaders revealed that the slight improvement in actual client pipeline conditions Intel recorded since the spring and early summer has only played a small role in their growing optimism for the year ahead.
Read this week’s report for a full breakdown of what agents are seeing on the ground.
A subtle boost
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
July → August
- Present buyer pipelines: -29 → -29
- Future buyer pipelines: +12 → +17
- Present seller pipelines: -10 → -8
- Future seller pipelines: +12 → +17
We see that the tracker’s positive movement this month isn’t driven by a large shift in present buyer- or listing-client pools.
Buyer pipeline conditions remained virtually unchanged from July to August on a year-over-year basis, and seller pipelines improved only slightly.
Still, when we zoom out to the spring and early summer, some clearer positive trends are apparent.
- Negativity among agents is down since June, when 57 percent of agent respondents said their buyer pipelines were worse off than last year’s.
- By August, only 52 percent of agent respondents told Intel they had experienced year-over-year declines in buyers.
On the listing side, the direction is a bit more muddled.
- Compared to buyer pipelines, far fewer agents who responded to Intel’s surveys — only 38 percent in August — say that their listing pipelines are worse off year-over-year.
- Still, things haven’t changed much on the listing side since May, when agents started to report a moderate dip in seller client pools. Instead, improvements to listing pipelines that occurred in late 2024 and early 2025 appear to be mostly intact.
With this in mind, the recent improvement in agent sentiment appears to be determined partly by renewed interest from potential buyer clients.
But to fully explain the positive movement, we have to look to the bigger-picture factors that agents are taking into account.
A look ahead
Unlike their view on present-day conditions, agents are notably bubblier when asked to assess their prospects for business in the year ahead.
- Two months ago, 34 percent of agent respondents to Intel’s survey said that they expected their buyer pipelines to be healthier a year later than they were at the time.
- By July, that share of buyer-side optimists had climbed to 42 percent. And by August, it had reached 45 percent.
And despite the lack of any new signs of movement on the ground with listing clients over that same span of time, agents feel similarly about their listing prospects as well.
For some of them, the prospects look much better.
- 37 percent of agent respondents in June told Intel that they expected their listing pipelines to improve over the next 12 months. Only 3 percent of agents told Intel they expected “significant” improvement.
- By August, 43 percent of agent respondents said they expected improvement on the listing side in the year ahead. Notably, the share that expected “significant” gains rose to 8 percent.
These latest numbers lend further weight to the idea that the uptick in agent sentiment in July was not a blip, but a growing sense that the path forward might look more promising.
And since it’s so far been accompanied by only modest improvements in actual buyers coming to the table, agents are almost certainly looking to bigger-picture factors that are buoying their outlook.
Among these, mortgage rates have ticked down in recent weeks, drawing some buyers back into the fold. Investors also broadly expect the Federal Reserve will be ready to resume the process of lowering interest rates later this month.
And if recent stock values are any indication, financial markets appear to be reassured that many publicly traded companies will be able to navigate some of the headwinds the economy faces in the months ahead.
But whether these factors combine for the kind of accelerated recovery that brokerage leaders and agents are eager to see remains an unanswered question.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey ran from Aug. 20 to Sept. 3, 2025, and received 474 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.
