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After several years of a lean and pricey housing market that largely favored sellers, buyers are finally regaining leverage and pulling the market back into 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 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 feels like, depending on the home, depending on the neighborhood, depending on the condition and the price point, that both the buyer and the seller do 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 inquiry of real estate agents selected randomly across the United States. Responses for the second-quarter survey were collected between June 23 and June 30. This quarter, 53 agents shared their insights.
Home sales in May were up slightly, 3% higher than the same month last year, according to the National Association of Realtors. That was the result of more supply on the market and easing prices.
Sellers appear to be getting more realistic when pricing their homes, not expecting the huge jumps seen in the first two years of the pandemic.
“No one really seems to be fighting me much on price like they used to,” said Bruce Jones, an agent with Compass in Nashville, Tennessee. “We’re not really seeing huge decreases in prices. We’ve kind of plateaued, but I don’t see people arguing too much about that. If it’s priced correctly, it is moving.”
Agents who reported at least one price cut to active listings dropped dramatically in CNBC’s second-quarter survey, at 57% compared with 89% during the third quarter of 2025.
Home prices are still slightly higher than they were a year ago, up just under 1%, according to the S&P Cotality Case-Shiller national home price index. Sellers, however, seem to be pricing more to the market, resulting in fewer cuts.
Asking prices in June were down 2.5% year over year, according to Realtor.com. That is the largest annual drop since the company began tracking this 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, and so you really need to put a property at the right price in order to get it sold,” said Martha Thorn, an agent with Coldwell Banker in Tampa, Florida.
With asking prices more in line with the current market, agents also reported fewer contract cancellations. Just 40% of respondents to CNBC’s survey said they had at least one contract fall through in the second quarter, compared with 51% in the first quarter of this year.
As for buyer worries, mortgage rates and prices have overtaken the economy as the biggest concerns reported by agents during the second quarter. Respondents said concerns over inventory have dramatically decreased. The Iran war sparked big worry in March, but that seems to have abated.
At the end of last year, 26% of agents said their buyers’ biggest concern was mortgage rates. That jumped to 37% in this quarter’s survey.
Mortgage rates had been falling after last summer, hitting a low of 5.99% on the 30-year fixed at the end of February, according to Mortgage News Daily. They then spiked higher at the start of March after the war began. The average rate on the 30-year fixed mortgage last peaked at 6.75% on May 19 and has since hovered right around the 6.6% range.
Inventory in June was up just under 2% from the year before, according to Realtor.com, and new listings rose 2.4%. The market is still considered quite lean, but not nearly as bad as it was just a few years ago. There are currently 1.1 million homes listed for sale, according to Realtor.com. At this time in 2023, just after the massive pandemic-driven housing boom, there were around 614,000.
Overall, however, agents have become much less optimistic about sales, according to CNBC’s survey.
In the second-quarter findings, just 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 think sales will stay about the same.
Stagnantly high mortgage rates are largely to blame for that. While the market is shifting into balance nationally, there is wide divergence locally.
“The challenge isn’t a lack of buyers, it’s a psychology gap,” said Joel Eronko with Nicholas Joel Realty Group in Houston. “My focus this quarter is keeping clients focused on real-time, hyper-local data rather than national economic headlines.”
