More real estate agents see balance

A version of this article appeared in the CNBC Property Play newsletter with Diana Olick. Property Play covers new and emerging opportunities for real estate investors, from individuals to venture capitalists, private equity funds, family offices, institutional investors and large public companies. become a member to receive future editions straight to your inbox.

After several years of a weak and expensive housing market that heavily favored sellers, buyers are finally regaining strength and pulling the market back into balance.

In the second quarter of the year, 44% of real estate agents surveyed by CNBC’s Housing Market Survey said they saw a balanced market between buyers and sellers. That share is up from 30% in the third quarter of last year, when CNBC began its quarterly survey.

“Depending on the home, neighborhood, condition and price point, both the buyer and seller seem to have a bit of an advantage,” 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 in the United States. Responses to the second quarter survey were collected between June 23 and June 30. This quarter, 53 representatives shared their opinions.

According to the National Association of Realtors, home sales in May increased slightly by 3% compared to the same month last year. This was the result of an increase in supply in the market and a decrease in prices.

Sellers appear to be more realistic in pricing their homes without expecting the huge increases seen in the first two years of the pandemic.

“No one seems to be fighting me about price as much as they used to,” said Bruce Jones, a Compass agent in Nashville, Tennessee. “We’re not really seeing huge declines in prices. We’ve had a plateau of sorts, but I don’t see people arguing about it too much. If it’s priced right, it’s moving.”

Agents reporting at least one price reduction on active listings dropped dramatically in CNBC’s second-quarter survey, falling to 57% compared to 89% in the third quarter of 2025.

Home prices are still slightly higher than a year ago, according to the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller national home price index; Just under 1%. But sellers seem to charge more to the market, causing less disruption.

Asking prices in June fell 2.5% year-over-year, according to Realtor.com. This was the largest annual decline and the eighth consecutive month of decline since the company started tracking it in 2017.

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

Agencies reported fewer contract cancellations while charging more favorable prices to the current market. Just 40% of respondents to CNBC’s survey said at least one contract fell apart in the second quarter, compared to 51% in the first quarter of this year.

As for buyers’ concerns, the biggest concerns agents reported in the second quarter were mortgage rates and prices outpacing the economy. Respondents said concerns about inventories have decreased significantly. The Iran war caused major concern in March, but that appears to have abated.

At the end of last year, 26% of agents said their buyers’ biggest concern was mortgage rates. In this quarter’s survey, that rate rose to 37%.

Mortgage rates fell after last summer, falling to a 30-year fixed level of 5.99% in late February, according to Mortgage News Daily. They then rose even higher in early March after the war began. The average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage last peaked at 6.75% on May 19 and has been hovering around 6.6% since then.

In June, inventories rose just under 2% from a year earlier, and new listings were up 2.4%, according to Realtor.com. The market is still considered to be quite weak, but not as bad as it was a few years ago. According to Realtor.com, there are currently 1.1 million homes listed for sale. By this time in 2023, on the heels of the massive housing boom caused by the pandemic, there were about 614,000.

But agents have become less optimistic about sales overall, according to CNBC’s survey.

In their second-quarter findings, only 19% of survey respondents said they expected sales to increase in the near future; In the third quarter of last year, this rate was 48%. In the second quarter, the majority of agents (67%) said they thought sales would remain about the same.

This is largely due to stagnant high mortgage rates. While the market is shifting towards equilibrium at the national level, there are also large differences at the local level.

“The problem is not 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 enable customers to focus on real-time, hyper-local data rather than national economic headlines.”