Real estate agents reported an unexpected hit to their listing pipelines in May as they navigated an uncertain market and weak spring, according to the latest Inman Intel Index survey results.
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Over the past two years, a slow but steady flow of new real estate listings has crept back into the market, offering a slight boost of new business for brokerages and a welcome expansion of options for their buyer clients.
But as the spring market draws to a close, some agents told Intel that their listing pipelines have suffered an unexpected hiccup.
TAKE THE INMAN INTEL SURVEY FOR MAY
The setback in listing-client interest was offset by newfound hopes that buyers might become easier to find amid a series of pauses in U.S. tariff policy, according to Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker update for the month of May.
The result? A market that’s essentially still stuck in limbo as it faces broad uncertainty — and few immediate prospects for a quick turnaround.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in May: +1
- Previous score: +1 in April
- Recent high point: +9 in January
Chart by Daniel Houston
This inventory stumble is just the latest setback for real estate agents, whose hopes for a more robust spring buying season had fallen back to Earth in many parts of the country.
Intel explores these complex dynamics in more detail in its latest Client Pipeline Tracker report.
A spring retrospective
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
April → May
- Present buyer pipelines: -27 → -26
- Future buyer pipelines: +5 → +10
- Present seller pipelines: -3 → -10
- Future seller pipelines: +13 → +12
As the spring came to a close, the Intel survey found clear signs that agents were disappointed with how their client pipelines developed.
- From late February to late May, the share of agents who responded to the Intel Index reported a year-over-year thinning of their buyer pipelines rose from 45 percent to 51 percent.
- The share of agent respondents who saw a year-over-year decline in listing client conditions crept up from 34 percent to 42 percent over the same span of time — with the most notable leap in negative sentiment occurring from April to May.
Despite this disappointing season, agents remain cautiously optimistic that a slightly better year may be on the way.
- 39 percent of agent respondents told Intel in May that they expected to be working with a bigger buyer client pool a year from now — although only 5 percent of all agent respondents were expecting a big improvement.
These numbers are essentially unchanged from before the spring market kicked into higher gear — a potential sign that despite the relatively slow season, agents are not viewing it as a harbinger of worse conditions ahead.
A rebalancing act
Real estate agents surveyed by Intel the previous month reported widespread concern about the direction of the economy — but not much change in their prospects of attracting clients.
In fact, agents in April did not seem to meaningfully lower their expectations even after the Trump administration announced a slew of new so-called “reciprocal” taxes on imports.
It’s notable then that after many of those tariffs were reduced temporarily, agents did meaningfully increase their expectations for buyer client pipelines in the 12 months ahead.
- Only 17 percent of agent respondents told Intel in May that they expected their buyer pipelines to be lighter a year from now, compared to 23 percent who shared that pessimistic outlook the month before.
This drop in pessimism was a big factor in offsetting the month-to-month weakening in listing pipelines in this month’s Client Pipeline Tracker update.
But beyond those numbers, agents don’t seem to buy that any short-term drop in listing pipelines will hold up amid a market that for years now has experienced persistent momentum behind a gradual replenishment of its supply of available homes.
- The number of new listings that entered the market in April was 9 percent higher than the same month last year and 22 percent higher than the same time the year before that, according to listing data from Realtor.com.
- Still, even after multiple years of upward momentum, this influx of new supply was 15 percent below prepandemic levels from April 2019.
Ultimately, while a rising supply of homes may help nudge brokerage revenues upward in some markets and offer buyers some extra negotiating power, agents are likely waiting for bigger declines in mortgage rates before getting their hopes up.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was being conducted May 20-June 3, 2025, and had received 494 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.
