For the third month in a row, real estate agents surveyed by Intel report healthy trends in their customer pipeline and clear, cautious optimism for the year ahead.
In their February responses, Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker metrics remained near their highest levels in years, and were down only slightly from the previous month’s peak.
February Client Pipeline Tracker Score: +11
Last score: +13 (December) 12 months ago: +6 (February 2025)
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The improvement in sentiment in recent months is due in part to agent conversations with potential clients ahead of the spring season. It is also consistent with recent data that suggests affordability is steadily improving in this high-price, high-fee environment.
Additionally, although the agents surveyed were slightly less bullish in February compared to the previous month, the results suggest that agents are not particularly perturbed by the weak pending sales indicators from the mid-winter market.
Read about the components included in your score in the full report.
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Our Client Pipeline Tracker summarizes how agents feel about their buyer and seller pipeline over the past year and in the near future.
Intel explained 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 the client pipeline is neither improving nor deteriorating. A positive score reflects a market where client pipelines are improving or are widely expected to improve within the next 12 months. The higher the rating, the more confident the agent is that things are progressing in the right direction. A negative score indicates that the client’s pipeline situation is deteriorating or is widely expected to deteriorate further next year.
A significantly positive total score falls around the +20 mark. This type of score means that much of the industry agrees that the pipeline is improving and will continue to improve.
On the other hand, a significantly negative total score is closer to -20. This is slightly lower than where the industry was in September 2023, when Intel first surveyed agents about the pipeline.
Results as high as +50 or as low as -50 can be observed for each of the four separate components included in the score.
Below are the component scores for the latest survey and how each sentiment category has changed since the last survey.
Tracker component score
January→February
Current buyer pipeline: -10 → -14 Future buyer pipeline: +22 → +20 Current seller pipeline: -1 → -3 Future seller pipeline: +21 → +20
By late February, agents were a little more cautious overall than they had been the previous month.
The buyer pipeline was hit the hardest, with the percentage of agents saying their pipeline worsened year over year from 34% in January to 41% the following month. The percentage of agents who said their buyer pipeline improved year-over-year remained unchanged over the same period at 25%.
However, if we take a step back, it is clear that the buyer pipeline is on a much better trajectory than in 2025.
Six months ago, in August, 52% of agents said their buyer pipeline had worsened year-over-year, a percentage that was highly representative of agent reports from the summer into the fall. Only 16% of agencies said their pipeline situation was better in August than a year ago.
And on other factors in the Client Pipeline Tracker, such as current listings and future customer prospects, agents are not far from where they were most optimistic in January. In fact, the number of real estate agents surveyed by Intel in February found that those expecting the pipeline to improve next year outnumbered those expecting it to worsen by a 4-to-1 margin.
On the buyer side, 50% of agents surveyed said they expected their pipeline to improve over the next 12 months, while 11% said they expected to lose buyers. On the public company side, 50% expected their pipeline to be better in a year, while 13% expected it to be worse.
To be sure, optimism is still limited. Few are expecting a sudden boom that will bring the market out of years of trading stagnation.
However, most agencies surveyed by Intel now expect business momentum to continue to increase.
Will it be different this time?
While the survey results clearly indicate a level of optimism not seen among Intel’s survey respondents at this time since at least 2024, there are several reasons to be cautious in our interpretation.
In the first two years Intel asked pipeline-related questions, the agency recorded its highest level of optimism in January. In 2024 and 2025, pipeline-based sentiment declined in February and plummeted in March.
It is worth asking whether the situation we see in 2026 will follow a similar seasonal pattern and whether these agents will be disappointed in the near future.
Intel tries to avoid the idea of seasonality by asking pipeline questions on a year-over-year basis. For example, when evaluating the current pipeline in February, agents are asked to compare it to February of the previous year. Additionally, when measuring future prospects, agents are asked what they expect their pipeline to look like in 12 months compared to today.
In theory, this should remove the complexity of seasonality from the agent’s emotions. However, it is unlikely that seasonality can be fully accounted for across all answers.
On the other hand, there are some important explanations for the sudden economic downturn in March 2024, and there are more serious causes in 2025 that may not be repeated next spring.
In March 2024, Intel launched an investigation into agents just days after the National Association of Realtors announced the terms of a long-standing commission lawsuit settlement, which some wondered would affect how agents pay their commissions and whether buyers would end up being hit with agent commissions.
While agent business sentiment plummeted in this study, it wasn’t because agents reported an actual decline in their existing customer pipeline. Rather, the sharp decline in sentiment in 2024 was driven almost entirely by agents’ expectations for the future buyer pipeline following the new rules.
In March 2025, the agency appears to have significantly deteriorated its pre-spring optimistic outlook, due in part to concerns about the overall economy. By that point, a flurry of new widespread tariffs on imports from the United States had begun to spook financial markets, and around the same time a sudden decline began.
It appears agents are once again revising downward their expectations for next year’s pipeline rather than assessing their existing customer pool. And for much of the year since then, the agency has expressed growing concerns about the economy in the Intel survey.
So what does that mean for interpreting this year’s results? It’s hard to say for sure. There is a good chance that the number of serious buyers and sellers that materialize in the spring will not match the expectations set by customer conversations in recent weeks. And we cannot rule out new shocks to the economy and industry, such as those that have occurred over the past two years.
However, it’s worth noting that the previous downturn in agent sentiment coincided with unique events impacting real estate and the economy as a whole. These economic downturns were primarily limited to real estate agents’ expectations for the future, rather than a significant drop in the actual customer base at the time. And agents’ increased optimism in this year’s survey is driven primarily by actual conversations with buyers and sellers, not just optimistic predictions for the coming months.
In any case, Intel’s March study may signal that agents’ assumptions are finally being tested.
Methodology note: This month’s Inman Intel Index survey was conducted from February 19th to 26th and had received over 880 responses as of Thursday morning. These results are preliminary and subject to revision. The entire Inman reader community was invited to participate, and a rotating selection of randomly selected community members were encouraged to participate via email. Users answered a series of questions about their self-proclaimed niche in the real estate industry, including real estate agents, brokers, financiers, and proptech entrepreneurs. Results reflect the views of our passionate Inman community, but do not necessarily align with the views of the broader real estate industry. This survey is conducted monthly.
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