After the spring housing market got off to a weak start, it appears to have found its footing according to several key indicators.
Pending sales rose in April. Mortgage applications were higher in May. And real estate agents told Intel in recent days that some of their buyer clients, once spooked by higher rates and gas prices, have come back to the table.
But in their view, the damage has been done.
Agent sentiment regarding business prospects for the year ahead continued to worsen in the final days of May — despite a meaningful stabilization of those agents’ present-day client pools, according to the latest results of the Inman Intel Index survey.
These developments pushed Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker metric to its lowest level since November.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in May: -0.5
- Previous high point: +13 in January
- 12 months ago: +2 in May 2025
Chart by Daniel Houston
These competing influences have plunged the brokerage industry back into a state of malaise — neither worsening, nor progressing as fast as once hoped.
Read the full breakdown of the score’s four components in this week’s report.
Too little, too late
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 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.
A significantly positive combined score falls 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.
A significantly negative combined score, on the other hand, falls closer to -20. That’s a bit lower than where the industry stood in September 2023, 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
April → May
- Present buyer pipelines: -20 → -19
- Future buyer pipelines: +9 → +3
- Present seller pipelines: -5 → -6
- Future seller pipelines: +13 → +8
Looking closely at the numbers that inform these component scores, the first thing that stands out is how early signs that buyers might be backing out of the market in the short term appear to have resolved.
- The share of agent respondents who reported buyer pipelines had “significantly” worsened over the past year dropped back down to 14 percent in May.
- That same share had swelled from 15 percent in February — before the U.S. and Israel struck Iran and the Strait of Hormuz was closed — to 21 percent by April.
But the stabilization of buyer-side pipelines appears to be cold comfort for many agents.
- Only 27 percent of agent respondents in May said that they expect their buyer pipelines to be healthier a year from now, down from 34 percent the month before and 51 percent in January.
- Agent outlooks for future listing pipelines followed an almost identical pattern, declining to 33 percent in recent weeks from 51 percent in the first month of the year.
It’s an across-the-board reassessment of what agents believe is possible in the year ahead. And at least so far, it’s not being driven primarily by short-term business prospects.
A new landscape
It can be hard to predict where things are headed. But real estate agents and their clients are facing a very different set of conditions today than they did heading into the spring.
- Rates on a 30-year mortgage before the Iran war began had fallen to 5.99 percent. Now they’re back up to 6.53 percent, according to Freddie Mac.
- Prices for consumer goods were 2.4 percent higher in February than the year before. By April, they were 3.8 percent higher year-over-year — largely due to hikes in the price of gasoline.
Even if the conflict in Iran ends in a deal that reopens the Strait of Hormuz, there may be lasting effects on prices as energy supply chains work through months without access to one of the global economy’s most crucial trade chokepoints.
And as these effects ripple through other sectors — from food to plastics — policymakers are signaling they’re increasingly likely to consider once again raising interest rates in order to nip another potential inflationary cycle in the bud.
Whatever happens next, these developments have undone many of the gains in affordability on which agents had pinned their hopes for significant business growth.
Intel will continue to track client pipelines closely in the months ahead.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey ran from May 19-28, and received 446 preliminary responses as of Thursday morning. 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.
