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After several years of a soft 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. That share is up from 30% in the third quarter of last year, when CNBC began its quarterly survey.
“It certainly sounds like, depending on the home, depending on the neighborhood, depending on the condition and the price point, that both the buyer and the seller have a little something,” 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. Second quarter survey responses were collected between June 23 and June 30. In this quarter, 53 agents shared their information.
Home sales in May rose slightly, 3% over the same month last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. That was the result of more supply in the market and lower prices.
Sellers appear to be more realistic when pricing their homes, not expecting the huge jumps seen in the first two years of the pandemic.
“No one seems to be fighting me as much on price as they used to,” said Bruce Jones, a Compass agent in Nashville, Tennessee. “We’re not really seeing a big drop in prices. We’ve gone up, but I don’t see people arguing too much about that. If the price is right, it goes.”
Agents reporting at least one active listing price reduction fell significantly in CNBC’s second-quarter survey, by 57% compared to 89% in the third quarter of 2025.
Home prices are still slightly higher than last year, up just under 1%, according to the S&P Totality Case-Shiller home price index. Sellers, however, appear to be more expensive in the market, resulting in fewer declines.
Asking prices in June were down 2.5% year over year, according to Realtor.com. That’s the biggest annual decline since the company began tracking this in 2017 and the eighth consecutive month of decline.
“I always tell sellers that I’m in the business of selling real estate, not keeping it, so you really need to price the property right for it to sell,” said Martha Thorn, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Tampa, Florida.
By asking prices in line with the current market, agents also reported fewer contract cancellations. Only 40% of CNBC survey respondents said they had at least one completed contract in the second quarter, compared to 51% in the first quarter of this year.
In terms of consumer concerns, mortgage rates and prices surpassed the economy as the biggest concerns reported by agents during the second quarter. Respondents said inventory concerns have decreased significantly. The Iran war caused a lot of anxiety in March, but that seems to have ended.
At the end of last year, 26% of agents said that the biggest concern of their customers was the amount of the loan. That rose to 37% in this quarter’s survey.
Mortgage rates have been on the decline since last summer, down 5.99% for a 30-year mortgage at the end of February, according to Mortgage News Daily. They then moved up in early March after the start of the war. The average 30-year fixed rate mortgage last rose to 6.75% on May 19 and has since risen to 6.6%.
Inventory in June was up just under 2% from a year ago, according to Realtor.com, and new listings were up 2.4%. The market is still considered very small, but not nearly as bad as it was a few years ago. There are currently 1.1 million homes listed for sale, according to Realtor.com. By this time in 2023, just after the pandemic-driven housing boom, there were 614,000.
Overall, however, agents are desperate for sales, according to a CNBC survey.
In the second quarter findings, 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 Q2, the majority of agents, 67%, said they thought sales would remain the same.
High mortgage rates are largely to blame for that. While the market is shifting to a national scale, there are wide variations locally.
“The challenge is not a lack of buyers, it’s a mindset gap,” said Joel Eronko with Nicholas Joel Realty Group in Houston. “My focus this quarter is to keep clients focused on real-time, hyper-local data rather than national economic headlines.”
