Real estate agents have shaken off their year-end fears and raised hopes for an economic recovery in 2026, according to new results from Intel’s December survey.
As Intel reflected last month on the sudden drop in business confidence among real estate agents in November, we considered whether it was a temporary dip or a harbinger of a more worrying loss of business momentum.
For now, I’ll just write it down as a small thing.
Intel’s Client Pipeline Tracker in December rebounded to the highest level observed for the end of a calendar year since the Intel Index survey first began in 2023.
Positive sentiment scores reflect agents who, while still in cautious territory, see both signs of life in their current customer pipeline and reason to expect more business over the coming year.
December Client Pipeline Tracker Score: +9
Previous score: -4 in November Previous high score: +9 in January 2025
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Intel is investigating what happened in November and why the agent’s attitude changed by December.
Read the full analysis in this week’s 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 very positive total score would sit 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, an extremely negative total score is closer to -20. This is slightly lower than where the industry was in September 2023, when Intel first surveyed distributors about its 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
November→December
Current buyer pipeline: -39 → -17 Future buyer pipeline: +7 → +18 Current seller pipeline: -20 → -6 Future seller pipeline: +11 → +19
Overall, we are seeing significant positive changes from month to month.
These changes probably say more about how agents felt in November than how much business conditions improved in December. (More on this later.)
But even if you zoom out a little and exclude November, December shows a step forward in agent optimism from previous months.
Comparing the four months ended in December and October, the components are as follows:
4 months from October to December
Current buyer pipeline: -28 → -17 Future buyer pipeline: +13 → +18 Current seller pipeline: -10 → -6 Future seller pipeline: +14 → +19
Here, we found that while agents’ sentiment about their current seller pipeline and future customer pipeline improved, there was particularly strong movement in the quality of their buyer pipeline.
The percentage of agents who said their buyer pipeline was “significantly down” compared to the same period last year fell from 24% in July to 15% at the end of the year. Meanwhile, the percentage of agents who say their buyer pipeline has improved year-over-year increased from 16% to 22% over the same period.
The reasons for this change are likely related to improvements in both the mortgage rate environment and actual housing transactions.
The 30-year mortgage rate, tracked by Mortgage News Daily, fell from about 6.8% in July to nearly 6.2% in December. The National Association of Realtors’ Pending Home Sales Index was 10% higher in November than in July, given normal seasonal patterns.
Ever since Intel began tracking its customer pipeline with a monthly survey of real estate agents, sentiment has tended to brighten in December and the first few months of the new year.
In a typical year, this optimism would be dampened by the time spring rolled around, either because sales were lower than expected or in 2024 when NAR’s settlement announcement upended the agency’s expectations about how business would proceed.
Whether we maintain optimism about a market turnaround this year will depend on a variety of factors in the coming months.
a shadow emerged
With new survey data coming in, Intel wanted to revisit November’s counterintuitive results.
At the time, the sharp decline in the quality of agent-reported buyer and seller pipelines was largely against the trend seen in mortgage rate and pending sales data.
Intel investigated this question last month and proposed that the unusual drop in sentiment could be due to customer and agent concerns about the economic impact of the recently ended government shutdown, or potentially to a trend among customers backing out of their home searches, which is not yet showing up in total pending sales.
Now that we have the December survey numbers, the explanation of a “temporary sharp decline” seems more important.
Intel will continue to track these trends over the coming year.
Methodology note: This month’s Inman Intel Index study was scheduled to run from December 19, 2025 to January 2025. By Friday morning, May 5, 2026, 433 responses had been received. 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.
Email Daniel Huston
