Real estate agents across the country reported a pullback in listing client pipelines in September amid a challenging competitive listing environment and growing concerns about the health of the economy.
Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker score worsened slightly from August to September as agents tempered their hopes for a housing market comeback through next year, according to preliminary results from the latest Intel Index survey.
While agent sentiment in recent months has mostly been on an upward trajectory, and outlook remains cautiously optimistic overall, the survey shed light on specific new headwinds that are testing the shape of a potential transaction recovery.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in September: +3
- Previous score: +5 in August
- Recent low point: -2 in June
Chart by Daniel Houston
These preliminary survey results also bring new clarity to the winding path that today’s market is taking — from the promising recent movement in mortgage rates to the rising economic anxieties faced by agents and clients alike.
And these competing factors are hitting today’s listing clients especially hard, agents say.
Buyer power and seller frustration
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 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
August → September
- Present buyer pipelines: -29 → -28
- Future buyer pipelines: +17 → +13
- Present seller pipelines: -8 → -13
- Future seller pipelines: +17 → +18
The most tangible change over the past month is in an area that has been showing up in the listing data for some time now: The weakening of new-listing growth across numerous parts of the country.
Agent accounts from the Intel Index survey seem to support the idea that this data broadly reflects their experience.
- Only 27 percent of agent respondents in September told Intel that their listing pipeline was heavier than at the same time last year, down from 32 percent the month before.
- That’s the smallest share of agents reporting year-over-year pipeline growth that Intel has recorded since November.
The share of agents whose listing pipelines have been hit especially hard in recent months also crept up.
- 17 percent of agent respondents in September told Intel their listing pipelines were “significantly lighter” year-over-year.
- That’s up from a low reading of 9 percent in January, and the highest share recorded since November.
This trend in seller clients wasn’t matched by a corresponding drop in buyers, however. And as agent outlook shifts for the year ahead, it may be driven more by factors other than what’s going on in the here and now.
A mixed picture
Even as agents reported a few listing clients slipping out of their pipelines, recent gains in buyer pools have largely held strong through September, agents report.
- Just under 50 percent of agent respondents this month said their buyer pipelines remained the same or better than they were a year ago — a slight uptick from 48 percent in August.
- Buyer clients have shown increasing willingness to explore this market since June, when fewer than 43 percent of agents who responded to Intel’s survey said they had seen buyer pipelines stay steady or improve from the previous year.
Still, agent optimism for the year ahead may be a bit more measured today than it was this time last month — particularly on the buyer side.
- The share of agents who expect their buyer pipelines to be better off a year from now slipped from 45 percent in August to 41 percent in September.
The overall movement in agent pipeline conditions and expectations appears disjointed: Buyer conditions are improving as mortgage rates have dropped in recent weeks, yet expectations for buyer-side business took a small hit. At the same time, seller pipelines thinned a bit in September without a drop in seller pipeline expectations for the next 12 months.
This disconnect between actual conditions and expectations may be partly due to recent economic data showing weakening employment, productivity and price stability.
- The share of agent respondents who said they were “concerned” or “very concerned” about the state of the U.S. economy crept up from 62 percent to 67 percent in September — the highest share of agents expressing unease since the early summer.
Still, the overall outlook for real estate revenue appears to be improving. Intel will continue to track these trends in the months to come.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was set to run from Sept. 18 to Oct. 1, 2025, and had received 452 responses as of Friday morning. These results are preliminary and will 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.
