In the face of today’s market, Eric Bramlett writes, clearly manage expectations, stay close to your customers, and build long-term trust.
Looking ahead to spring 2026, there are reasonable grounds for market optimism. Interest rates briefly fell below 6% in February, inventory is slowly rebuilding, and the National Association of Realtors’ chief economist had predicted a 14% increase in existing home sales this year.
Then March arrived, and the number of existing home sales fell to 3.98 million, the lowest level in nine months, and the lowest March pace since 2009.
It’s worth thinking separately about what happened and what the agent needs to do about it. The first is primarily context. The second thing is work.
Conflict between buyers and sellers continues
The most persistent dynamic in this market is the valuation gap that neither side is willing to close. Sellers are still clinging to peak-era pricing. In Zillow’s quarterly Agent Sentiment Survey, respondents say sellers are being stubborn about price expectations, with one respondent telling Zillow that sellers still expect “three times the asking price.” This is an outlier expressively, but not emotionally.
On the other hand, buyers are not panicking. they are waiting. Existing home sales in April rose only 0.2% from the previous month, and NAR said homes were on the market longer as consumers took longer to make decisions. And even though newly listed homes increased at a faster pace than sales, home sales in April were almost flat compared to the same month last year.
As inventory increases, so does hesitancy. This combination indicates a lack of urgency on the part of the buyer. And without urgency, most people won’t move.
Affordability improved, then worsened again
Interest rates bottomed out at around 5.95% at the beginning of the year, briefly creating the most affordable conditions in four years. Then the Iran war happened. According to ICE’s April Mortgage Monitor, 30-year rates rose about 40 basis points from their floor, pulling about 4% of purchasing power back from the market as the spring season began.
NAR later revised down its sales growth rate for 2026 from 14% to 4%, citing rising interest rates as the main factor.
But interest rates are only part of the story. Lawrence Yun, NAR’s chief economist, said in April that despite the stock market hitting record highs, consumer confidence is at a historic low and buyers are taking longer to commit. New home sales fell 6.2% from March to April, down 11.3% from a year earlier, and NAHB’s chief economist expects the decline to continue.
If qualified buyers have the financial capacity but lack confidence, lower rates alone won’t bring them off the sidelines. The decision calculus is changing and agents who treat this as a pricing issue are misreading it.
5 ways agents can navigate a housing market that refuses to rebound
1. Reset the seller’s expectations at the first meeting instead of the third. Price reductions after a long period of sale on the market cost the seller more than the exact list price. Before a seller number is finalized, bring current comp data and absorption rates into the listing conversation. That’s when conversation is still possible.
2. Use hyperlocal data. Domestic numbers are noise to clients. While many Western markets continue to weaken, the Midwest and Northeast are outperforming. Even if your clients are reading the national headlines, they aren’t reading your market. Understand your submarket’s actual days on market and listings-to-sales ratios and use them to your advantage.
3. Reframe buyer patience as a strategy, not a problem. Buyers who are taking their time aren’t heartbroken. In this environment, a buyer with a clear plan and realistic expectations will be a better customer than one chasing an urgency that doesn’t exist. Help students think about a stronger negotiating position now than in recent years.
4. Shift the conversation from interest rate speculation to pricing strategy. Clients waiting for rates to drop are waiting for something out of their control. The prices they negotiate, the concessions they ask for, the due diligence they do, all of that is still within their control. Moving the frame changes the energy of the room.
5. Communicate often and make it worth reading. Pipelines don’t work well in depressed markets. Agents who check in with useful context, such as relevant local data points, just-ended comps, and honest reads about what’s going on, stay in the conversation. Agents who remain silent or send general check-ins are not.
market you have
Nancy Vanden Houten, chief economist at Oxford Economics, expects home sales to “remain flat and start to gradually increase by the end of the year.” In my opinion, that’s the extent of realistic planning.
The agents I most admire today are not waiting for the market to turn around. They have the difficult job of clearly managing expectations, staying close to their customers, and building long-term trust. This is what a good intermediary looks like in a market like this.
