Intel observed a notable rise in late June in the share of agents who said their buyer client pools were “substantially” slimmer than at the same point last year.
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A weaker-than-expected lineup of buyer clients to open real estate’s most crucial closing season forced agents to downgrade their outlook for the year ahead, a new Intel survey shows.
The share of agent respondents to June’s Inman Intel Index survey who said they experienced a year-over-year decline in buyer pipelines rose from 52 percent in May to 57 percent in June, according to the latest results.
And that helped push overall agent sentiment to its lowest point since September, as measured by Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker metric.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in June: -2
- Previous score: +2 in May
- Recent high point: +9 in January
Chart by Daniel Houston
Short-term listing client conditions remained mostly unchanged as the page turned to summer and an inventory recovery continued apace. Still, the agents Intel surveyed had substantially scaled back on their optimism for future business on both sides of the transaction.
This week’s report breaks down all the survey components that inform the score — and lays out what they mean for the months ahead.
A weak start to summer
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
May → June
- Present buyer pipelines: -27 → -33
- Future buyer pipelines: +11 → +6
- Present seller pipelines: -9 → -9
- Future seller pipelines: +13 → +9
Summer is supposed to be the season where agents close on the highest volume of transactions — and secure the biggest chunk of their revenues for the year.
And while that seasonal ramp-up is likely happening, the momentum has not been as strong as agents are accustomed to at this time of year.
- 24 percent of agent respondents described buyer pipeline declines from last June that were “substantial” in scope, while another 33 percent described more moderate hits to buyer-side client pools.
- The previous month, fewer than 21 percent of respondents told Intel they observed “substantial” year-over-year declines in their buyer pipelines, and another 31 percent said they experienced a smaller fall.
These buyer-side struggles coincided with declining outlooks for the year ahead.
- On the buyer side, the share of agents who told Intel that they expected to be working with more clients 12 months from now fell from 40 percent in May to 34 percent in June.
- The seller-side trend was even more pronounced, with 44 percent of agent respondents in May expressing optimism for their listing pipelines in the year ahead, and just under 37 percent doing the same in June.
But for many of these agents, the optimism wasn’t replaced with pure pessimism, but with more of a wait-and-see stance.
- The share of agent respondents who said they expect their buyer pipelines to be “about the same” a year from now crept up from 43 percent in May to 46 percent in June.
- Meanwhile, seller pipelines were expected to remain about the same 12 months from now by 46 percent of respondents in June, up from 38 percent the month before.
Where the market stands
Despite this relatively weak start to real estate’s busy season, agents are still more or less treading water with their listing clients amid a slow but steady climb in inventory.
- Drawing from both ends of the spectrum, the share of agents in June who told Intel that their listing client pools were “about the same” as last year rose from 27 percent in May to 34 percent in June.
As a result, the present condition of listing pipelines were the only component of the Client Pipeline Tracker that didn’t meaningfully worsen in the early weeks of summer.
These results come in the context of a general rising tide of new listings that have served as a silver lining to the nation’s ongoing depressed sales environment.
But as Intel explored a few weeks ago, many markets have yet to fully participate in that recovery, including many large metros sprawling throughout the Midwest and Northeast.
As the market recovery enters a distinct new chapter, Intel will continue to closely follow these and other trends.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was conducted June 21-July 3, 2025, and received 522 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.
