Buyer client pools are thinner this spring than agents had hoped: Intel

This report is available exclusively to subscribers of Inman Intel, the data and research arm of Inman offering deep insights and market intelligence on the business of residential real estate and proptech. Subscribe today.

For the broader economy, the last month has been a disorienting whirlwind.

Sweeping new tariffs were announced on U.S. imports, then some were paused. A trade war with China ramped up to fever pitch. And stock prices plunged, then recovered as investors sifted through financial numbers and hung on policymakers’ every word.

But for the brokerage business, the waters have remained relatively calm, for now.

The uncertainty roiling financial markets has yet to infect agents in their assessment of their current client pool or their business prospects for the year ahead, according to the latest update to Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker metric.

Still, agents who responded in late April to the Intel Index survey affirmed that their buyer client pools were thinner in the spring than they had once hoped. Their expectations for future revenue growth have also moderated over the past three months.

• The share of agent respondents who said their buyer pipelines are healthier than last year’s has slipped from 55 percent in January to 44 percent in April.

While the overall outlook by agents is less bullish than it was to start the year, agents in late April weren’t anticipating a broad downturn in an already depressed housing transaction environment.

Client Pipeline Tracker score in April: +1

• Previous score: -1 in March
• Recent high point: +9 in January

But under the surface, Intel’s surveys reflect that agent expectations may be shifting — just in one direction for their buyer clients, and a different one for sellers.

Intel explores these complex dynamics in more detail in its latest Client Pipeline Tracker report.

A buyer-seller split emerges?

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

March → April

1. Present buyer pipelines: -22 → -27
2. Future buyer pipelines: +5 → +5
3. Present seller pipelines: -8 → -3
4. Future seller pipelines: +8 → +13

The big takeaway this month: Recent market swings since the beginning of April appear to be further decoupling agent outlooks for buyers and sellers.

As discussed, buyer pipeline scores trended down from March to late April. But at the same time, some agents appear to be gaining in optimism about their prospects for nabbing new listings.

• The share of agent respondents who told Intel they had observed “significant” year-over-year improvements in their seller pipelines jumped from 4 percent in late March to 9 percent in late April.
• Optimism for future listings also grew from month to month. Nearly 43 percent of agent respondents said they thought they would see growth in listing pipelines, up from 37 percent the month before.

The potential explanations for this growing gap between buyer and seller outlooks are complex.

If some agents expect present uncertainty may tilt the economy into recession, that could bring about reductions in mortgage rates and possibly force sales of distressed properties — both of which could free up some new inventory that hits the market.

But recessions have also historically reduced incentives for homeowners to list. Falling sale prices and the expectation of fewer buyers often persuade would-be sellers to remain on the sidelines.

Regardless of the effect on new listings, agents are clearly lowering their expectations that there will be enough buyers to spur a true transaction rebound, at least in the next few months.

The recovery that wasn’t

While the circumstances are different, many agents appear to be experiencing a case of deja vu, Intel survey results suggest.

For the second year in a row, real estate agents opened the year with cautious optimism for the trajectory of their client pools.

And for the second year in a row, they’ve had to tamp down these hopes while their brokerages muddle through another period of uncertainty in the broader economy.

And make no mistake, agents are concerned about the broader economy.

• In Intel’s survey in late April, 3 in 4 agents and 2 in 3 brokerage leaders said they were “concerned” or “very concerned” about the U.S. economy right now.

Throughout much of 2024, this caution deepened into outright pessimism as agents grappled with the implications of new settlement rules and rate cuts that kept getting pushed out into the future.

So far in 2025, agents expectations appear to just be stuck in neutral. Intel will continue to closely follow changes in brokerage sentiment as the year progresses.

Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was conducted April 17-May 2, 2025, and had received 426 responses as of Friday morning. These results are preliminary and may 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.

Email Daniel Houston