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A nascent uptick in home sales that began to slowly register in the fall may be about to pick up steam.
Real estate agents across the country reported significant upward momentum in their buyer and seller pipelines to close the year, marking an acceleration in the upward trend from the months before.
The results from the latest industry survey pushed Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker score for December into decidedly positive territory for the first time in 10 months — signaling both meaningful improvement in recent client prospects and an increasingly hopeful revenue outlook for the year ahead.
Client Pipeline Tracker score in December: +7
- Previous score: -1 in November
- Recent low point: -9 in May
Chart by Daniel Houston
This growing pool of potential clients bodes well for pending sales in the early weeks of the year — and hard commission revenues later in January and February.
And it’s one of the most bullish signs Intel has yet gathered that a durable recovery in home transactions may finally be underway.
Read the full breakdown of the latest Client Pipeline Tracker results.
Return of the buyer?
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
November → December
- Present buyer pipelines: -30 → -19
- Future buyer pipelines: +6 → +16
- Present seller pipelines: -15 → -7
- Future seller pipelines: +13 → +18
Across the board, agents report an improvement in business conditions — especially on the buyer side.
- Only 17 percent of agent respondents reported a “significant” year-over-year decline in their buyer pipelines in December, down from 26 percent the month before.
- Meanwhile, 57 percent of agents report their buyer pipelines have been stable or even improved in the last year — up from 47 percent the previous month. It’s the first time since March that a majority of agents said their buyer pipelines have been steady or on the rise.
With new buyers coming back into the fold in recent weeks, agents are also becoming more optimistic about the year ahead.
- 49 percent of agent respondents told Intel in late December that they expect their buyer pipelines to improve over the next 12 months, a big jump from 38 percent the month before.
The last time this many agents had a positive outlook for the year to come was in January of 2024 — when an unseasonably strong crop of clients contributed to an unseasonably strong surge in sales the following month.
In the coming weeks, new data from government agencies and the National Association of Realtors will confirm whether this boost in the buyer pool will translate into actual sales, as it has in the past.
The picture for rates — and listings
Although buyer pipelines made the biggest strides to close the year, the outlook for listing clients improved as well.
This progress in some ways has defied the short-term trend in mortgage rates, which have jumped by about a percentage point since September.
Through most of that time, listing pipelines remained relatively stable. Only in late December did agents report a significant year-over-year upswing in potential listings.
- From July through November, the share of agent respondents who said their listing pipelines had either remained steady or improved over the last 12 months hovered between 55 percent and 59 percent.
- But by late December, 69 percent of agents reported their listing pipelines had stabilized or grown over the previous year.
December marked the first significant improvement in actual year-over-year listing pipelines in that time.
But in some ways, it was a culmination of improving expectations for listing pipelines that had been building since August — a time when a broad consensus of financial analysts was predicting the Federal Reserve’s impending pivot to rate cuts, which it went on to announce a few weeks later.
- In July, only 31 percent of agent respondents said they expected their listing pipelines to be better off in the year to come.
- By late December, 49 percent said they expected their listing pipelines to improve over the next 12 months.
Ultimately, the shape and pace of the recovery remains an open question. And the market could easily suffer setbacks along the way as mortgage rates remain volatile.
But when soon-to-be-issued reports disclose the number of sales that occurred over the holidays and in the winter weeks to come, they’ll be grounded in the context of a larger pool of clients — and an increasingly optimistic cohort of agents — that has yet to make its way into the official numbers.
Methodology notes: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was conducted Dec. 18, 2024-Jan. 3, 2025, and had received 482 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.
