Even as many real estate agents report that business conditions on the ground are gradually improving, their outlook for future business slipped for the second consecutive month in Intel’s ongoing surveys.
Agents who responded to October’s Intel Index survey reported having a bit less confidence that their pipelines would improve in the year ahead than they expressed in the summer.
But this weakening optimism about the future was partly offset by a gradual, continuing improvement in actual client pipelines compared to this time last year, agents said in the survey.
And all this results in a cautiously positive, forward-looking outlook as measured by Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker metric.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in October: +2
- Previous score: +3 in September
- Recent low point: -2 in June
Chart by Daniel Houston
For four consecutive months, agents’ self-reported buyer pipeline conditions have come in better than at their low point in June.
And it’s at the heart of a gradual improvement in agent sentiment that dates back to the chaotic month of April.
Read the full survey results and component scores in this week’s report.
The slow build
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
September → October
- Present buyer pipelines: -29 → -26
- Future buyer pipelines: +13 → +12
- Present seller pipelines: -12 → -9
- Future seller pipelines: +17 → +11
Here we see that on both the buyer and seller sides, agent negativity about present-day conditions has been weakening.
Let’s break down what’s going into this trend.
- For the first time since March, the share of agents who said their pipelines are worse off than the same time last year fell below 50 percent.
- 48 percent of agent respondents in October told Intel their buyer pipelines were worse off year-over-year, compared to 51 percent who said the same the month before and 57 percent who said so in June.
Almost no respondents described a year-over-year improvement in buyer pipelines as “significant” in scope.
- Instead, 36 percent of agent respondents in October described buyer pipelines that were “about the same” year-over-year.
- Another 15 percent said they had seen slight improvement in their prospective buyer pool — a small share that still represented the highest mark since May.
On the other side of the deal, annual growth in listing pipelines was still considered mixed.
But some of the most extreme pessimism toward listing conditions in recent months appeared to shift to more tempered assessments of the market.
- The share of agents who told Intel in October that their pool of listing prospects had “significantly” worsened from last year dropped to 12 percent from 16 percent the month before.
- That level of strong pessimism toward listing pipelines was back roughly where it was in May, before slow listing growth in the summer market led some agents to take a more negative viewpoint.
Still, for many agents, these self-reported attitudes about present conditions aren’t always translating to a more hopeful outlook for the future.
Tapping the brakes
Since mid-summer, the trend in agent sentiment toward their own personal business prospects has been mostly positive.
But the past two months’ worth of survey responses have amounted to a brief pause in that upward trend.
Outlooks for listing pipelines took a particularly hard ding in October.
- The share of agents who said they expected their listing pipelines to worsen in the year ahead crept up to 16 percent in recent weeks from 13 percent in September.
- Particularly notable was the rise in the small share of agents who expected their listing pipelines to thin out “significantly” in the months to come: up to 6 percent, the highest share recorded since mid-2024.
On the listing side in particular, this could turn out to be a one-month blip.
But it follows continued stalled growth in the rate at which new listings are coming onto the market in recent months. And it coincides with increased chatter from policymakers that recent reductions in mortgage rates might have to slow in the months ahead.
When it comes to buyers, agents are increasingly split on the direction they see things going in the year ahead.
- Fewer agent respondents in October said they expected stable buyer pipelines in the next 12 months — 41 percent, down from 46 percent the month before.
- But the agents fled the middle in both directions, with about as many new respondents reporting they expected their buyer pipelines to worsen as improve in the year ahead.
Overall, none of this amounts to a major shift in sentiment from September to October. Intel will continue to monitor agent business sentiment to see if steady upward momentum from recent months continues.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was set to run from Oct. 23-31, 2025, and received 681 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.
