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After several years of a tight and expensive real estate market, real estate agents are starting to see greater balance.
In the second quarter of the year, 44% of real estate agents surveyed in CNBC’s Housing Market Survey said they were seeing a balanced buyer-seller market. That share is up from 30% in the third quarter of last year, when CNBC began its quarterly survey.
“It definitely feels like, depending on the house, depending on the neighborhood, depending on the condition and price, that the buyer and 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 second quarter survey were collected between June 23 and 30. This quarter, 53 agents shared their perspectives.
Home sales in May increased slightly, 3% more than the same month last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. This was the result of increased supply in the market and falling prices.
Sellers appear to be becoming more realistic in pricing their homes, without expecting the huge increases seen during the first two years of the pandemic.
“No one really seems to fight me on price like they used to,” said Bruce Jones, an agent with Compass in Nashville, Tennessee. “We’re not really seeing huge drops in price. We’ve kind of stagnated, but I don’t see people debating it too much. If the price is right, it moves.”
Agents reporting at least one price drop on active listings fell dramatically in CNBC’s second-quarter survey, to 57%, compared to 89% in Q3 2025.
Home prices are still slightly higher than they were a year ago, up just under 1 percent, according to the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller National Home Price Index. However, sellers appear to be setting prices higher than the market, leading to fewer discounts.
Asking prices in June were down 2.5% year over year, according to Realtor.com. This is the largest annual decline since the company began tracking this trend in 2017 and the eighth consecutive month of decline.
“I always tell sellers that my job is to sell houses, not to store them, and so you really have to price a property right to sell it,” said Martha Thorn, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Tampa, Florida.
With asking prices more in line with the current market, agents have also reported fewer contract cancellations. Just 40% of respondents to CNBC’s survey said they saw at least one deal fall through in the second quarter, compared to 51% in the first quarter of this year.
When it comes to buyer concerns, mortgage rates and prices outpaced the economy and became the top concerns reported by agents during the second quarter. Respondents said concerns about inventory had diminished significantly. The war in Iran caused serious concerns in March, but these appear to have eased.
At the end of last year, 26% of agents said their buyers’ biggest concern was mortgage rates. This figure increased to 37% in this quarter’s survey.
Mortgage rates had been falling since last summer, reaching a 30-year low of 5.99% set in late February, according to Mortgage News Daily. They then increased in early March, after the start of the war. The average rate for a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage last peaked at 6.75% on May 19 and has been hovering around the 6.6% range ever since.
In June, inventory 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 quite 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, just after the massive housing boom caused by the pandemic, there were about 614,000.
However, overall, agents have become much less optimistic about sales, according to the CNBC survey.
In the second quarter results, only 19% of respondents said they expected sales to improve in the near future, compared to 48% in the third quarter of last year. In the second quarter, the majority of agents, 67 percent, said they thought sales would stay about the same.
The stagnation of high mortgage rates is largely to blame. While the market balances nationally, there are large divergences locally.
“The challenge is not a lack of buyers, it’s a psychological gap,” said Joel Eronko of Nicholas Joel Realty Group in Houston. “My goal this quarter is to keep clients focused on real-time, hyperlocal data rather than national economic headlines.”