More real estate agents are seeing balance

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After several years of a poor and expensive housing market, real estate agents are starting to see more balance.

In the second quarter of the year, 44% of real estate agents surveyed in CNBC’s housing market survey said they see a balanced market between buyer and seller. This share is up from 30% in the third quarter of last year, when CNBC began its quarterly survey.

“It definitely seems like, depending on the house, depending on the neighborhood, depending on the condition and the price point, that both the buyer and the seller have a little bit of leverage,” said Jeremy Kane, a real estate agent with EXP Realty in Denver.

The CNBC Housing Market Survey is a national survey of randomly selected real estate agents across the United States. Responses to the Q2 survey were collected June 23-30. This quarter, 53 agents shared their views.

Home sales in May rose slightly, 3% higher than the same month last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. This was a result of increased supply in the market and lower prices.

Sellers appear to have become more realistic when pricing their homes, and did not expect the huge jumps we saw in the first two years of the pandemic.

“No one seems to beat me as much on price as they used to,” said Bruce Jones, a Compass agent in Nashville, Tennessee. “We’re not really seeing big price declines. We’ve plateaued, but I don’t see people arguing too much about that. If it’s priced right, it’s moving.”

Agents reporting at least one price reduction to active listings declined significantly in CNBC’s Q2 survey, at 57% compared to 89% during Q3 2025.

Home prices are still slightly higher than they were a year ago, rising just under 1%, according to the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller National Home Price Index. However, sellers appear to be pricing more to market, resulting in smaller discounts.

Asking prices in June fell 2.5% year over year, according to Realtor.com. This is the largest annual decline since the company began tracking it in 2017 and the eighth straight month of declines.

“I always tell sellers that I’m in the business of selling homes, not storing them, so you really need to offer the property at the right price for it to sell,” said Martha Thorne, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Tampa, Florida.

With asking prices in line with the current market, agents also reported fewer contract cancellations. Only 40% of respondents to the CNBC survey said they failed at least one contract in the second quarter, compared to 51% in the first quarter of this year.

As for buyers’ concerns, mortgage rates and prices surpassed the economy as the top concerns reported by agents during the second quarter. Participants said concerns about inventory have decreased significantly. The Iran war caused great concern in March, but that appears to have subsided.

At the end of last year, 26% of agents said buyers’ biggest concern was mortgage rates. That jumped to 37% in this quarter’s survey.

Mortgage rates had fallen after last summer, hitting a low of 5.99% over 30 years set at the end of February, according to Mortgage News Daily. These rates then increased at the beginning of March after the war began. The average interest rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage peaked at 6.75% on May 19, and has since hovered around the 6.6% range.

Inventory in June was up just under 2% from a year earlier, according to Realtor.com, and new listings were up 2.4%. The market is still considered very thin, but not as bad as it was just a few years ago. There are currently 1.1 million homes for sale, according to Realtor.com. At this time in 2023, after a massive housing boom caused by the pandemic, there were about 614,000.

However, overall, agents are becoming less optimistic about sales, according to the CNBC poll.

In the second quarter results, only 19% of respondents said they expect sales to improve in the near future, down from 48% in the third quarter of last year. In the second quarter, a majority of agents, 67%, said they believed sales would remain about the same.

Stagnantly high mortgage rates are largely to blame for this. While the market is in equilibrium at the national level, there is wide variation at the local level.

“The challenge is not a lack of buyers, but a psychological gap,” said Joel Eronko of Nicholas Joel Real Estate Group in Houston. “My focus this quarter is to keep clients focused on real-time hyperlocal data rather than national economic headlines.”