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The housing market has been quiet and expensive for the past few years, but real estate agents are starting to find more balance.
In the second quarter of this year, 44% of real estate agents surveyed by CNBC’s Housing Market Survey said they saw a balanced market among buyers and sellers. That’s up from 30% in the third quarter of last year, when CNBC began its quarterly survey.
“It certainly feels like depending on the home, depending on the neighborhood, depending on the condition and price range, both buyers and sellers have more or less influence,” said Jeremy Cain, 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 from June 23 to June 30. This quarter, 53 agents shared their insights.
Home sales rose slightly in May, rising 3% from the same month last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. It was the result of increased supply to the market and moderation of prices.
Sellers are not anticipating the large increases seen during the first two years of the pandemic and appear to be more realistic in pricing their homes.
“I don’t see anyone competing with me as much on price as they used to,” said Bruce Jones, an agent with Compass in Nashville, Tennessee. “We don’t really see a huge drop in prices. We’ve plateaued to some extent, but no one is really discussing that. If prices are set correctly, prices are moving.”
CNBC’s second quarter survey found that 57% of agents reported at least one price reduction on active listings, down from 89% in Q3 2025.
Home prices are still slightly higher than a year ago, rising just under 1%, according to the S&P Kotality Case-Shiller National Home Price Index. However, sellers seem to be setting their prices higher to match the market, resulting in fewer discounts.
According to Realtor.com, asking prices in June were down 2.5% from the same month last year. This was the largest annual decline since the company began tracking the survey in 2017, and the eighth consecutive month of decline.
“I always tell sellers that I’m in the business of selling homes, not storing them, so in order to sell a property, you actually have to price it right,” said Martha Thorne, a Coldwell Banker agent in Tampa, Florida.
With asking prices now in line with the current market, agents also reported fewer cancellations. In the CNBC survey, only 40% of respondents said they had at least one deal fall through in the second quarter, compared to 51% in the first quarter of this year.
As for buyer concerns, mortgage rates and mortgage prices outpaced the economy as the top concern agents reported in the second quarter. Respondents said their concerns about inventory had decreased dramatically. The Iran war caused great concern in March, but it appears to have subsided.
At the end of last year, 26% of agents said mortgage rates were buyers’ biggest concern. That jumped to 37% in this quarter’s survey.
According to Mortgage News Daily, mortgage rates have been falling since last summer, hitting a record low of 5.99% for a 30-year fixed rate at the end of February. Then, at the beginning of March, after the war began, they rose further. The average interest rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage peaked at 6.75% on May 19 and has hovered around the 6.6% range since then.
According to Realtor.com, June inventory increased by just under 2% from a year ago, and the number of new listings increased by 2.4%. The market is still considered very lean, but not as bad as it was just a few years ago. According to Realtor.com, there are currently 1.1 million homes for sale. At this time in 2023, just after the massive pandemic housing boom, the number was approximately 614,000 units.
But overall, agents are less optimistic about sales, according to a CNBC survey.
In the second quarter of the survey, only 19% of respondents said they expected sales to improve in the near future, down from 48% in the third quarter of last year. In the second quarter, the majority of agents (67%) said they expected sales to be roughly flat.
The main reason for this is that mortgage interest rates remain high. Although the market is becoming more balanced nationally, there are significant regional discrepancies.
“The problem isn’t a lack of buyers, it’s a psychological gap,” said Joel Eronko of Nicholas Joel Realty Group in Houston. “My focus this quarter is to help our clients focus on real-time, hyper-local data rather than national economic headlines.”
