When reviewing November’s sudden drop in real estate agent business sentiment last month, Intel examined whether it was a temporary blip or the leading edge of a more concerning loss of business momentum.
Chalk it up as a blip, for now.
Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker in December rebounded to the highest level observed to end a calendar year since the Intel Index survey first launched in 2023.
The positive sentiment score, while still in cautious territory, reflects agents who are seeing both signs of life in their present-day client pipelines and reasons to hope for more transactions in the year ahead.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in December: +9
- Previous score: -4 in November
- Previous high point: +9 in January 2025
Chart by Daniel Houston
Intel examines what happened in November and why, by December, agents had changed their tune.
Read the full analysis in this week’s report.
The here and now
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.
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 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
November → December
- Present buyer pipelines: -39 → -17
- Future buyer pipelines: +7 → +18
- Present seller pipelines: -20 → -6
- Future seller pipelines: +11 → +19
Across the board, we see huge positive shifts on a month-to-month basis.
These shifts probably say more about how agents were feeling in November than how much business conditions improved in December. (More on that in a moment.)
But even if we zoom out a bit and take November out of the picture, December marked a step forward in agent optimism from the preceding few months.
Here’s how the components look when comparing December against the four-month period that ended in October.
4 months ending in October → December
- Present buyer pipelines: -28 → -17
- Future buyer pipelines: +13 → +18
- Present seller pipelines: -10 → -6
- Future seller pipelines: +14 → +19
Here, it becomes clear that while agent sentiment regarding present seller pipelines and future client pipelines has improved, there’s been particularly strong movement in the quality of buyer pipelines.
- The share of agents who said their buyer pipelines were “significantly lighter” than the same time last year dropped from 24 percent in July to 15 percent at the end of the year.
- Meanwhile, the share of agents who said their buyer pipelines were better off year-over-year rose from 16 percent to 22 percent over the same span.
Reasons for this shift are likely tied to improvements in both the mortgage rate environment and actual home transactions.
- The rate for a 30-year mortgage tracked by Mortgage News Daily dropped from about 6.8 percent in July to closer to 6.2 percent in December.
- The National Association of Realtors’ Pending Home Sales Index was 10 percent higher in November than it was in July, after accounting for normal seasonal patterns.
Since Intel started tracking client pipelines in its monthly survey of real estate agents, sentiment has tended to grow rosier in December and the early months of the new year.
In previous years, this optimism was blunted by the time spring rolled around as sales numbers came in softer than hoped — or in 2024 as the NAR settlement announcement upended agents’ expectations for how business would be done.
Whether the optimism for a market turnaround will hold this year depends on a variety of factors in the months to come.
A shadow lifted
Now that newer survey data is in, Intel wanted to revisit November’s counterintuitive result.
At the time, a sharp drop in the quality of agents’ self-reported buyer and seller pipelines swam largely against the current of what we were seeing in the data of mortgage rates and pending sales.
Intel explored this question last month and proposed that the unusual dip in sentiment might be attributed either to client and agent concerns about the economic impact of the recently ended government shutdown or, potentially, a trend of clients backing out of home searches that had yet to show up even in pending-sales totals.
Now that we have December’s survey numbers in hand, it seems the “temporary blip” explanation holds more weight.
Intel will continue to track these trends in the year ahead.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was set to run from Dec. 19, 2025-Jan. 5, 2026, and had received 433 responses by 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.
