This is a monthly breakdown of national market data powered by Inman Market View. The goal: to put more local data in the hands of the Inman community, and to place it in a context that’s highly relevant for the U.S. brokerage industry.
Brokerage revenues made sneaky gains over the past year even as a rising tide of new listings — not a decline in sales — continued to erode the homeseller’s once-intractable negotiating edge.
The pool of potential commissions available to real estate brokerages was 4 percent higher this spring than it was during the same period last year, according to an Inman Market View analysis of listing data from Realtor.com.
These revenue gains were made possible by home prices that were bid up to unprecedented heights in the early pandemic real estate boom, then proved durable even through the subsequent downturn in transactions.
But notably, the spring market, which officially makes way for summer on Friday, also blew past a significant milestone: For the first time, the demand for the typical home listing has dropped below where it was in a typical pre-pandemic spring.
SEE HOW A BOOM IN NEW SUPPLY HAS TRANSFORMED DENVER
The result? A national environment that is still admittedly seller-friendly, but the least seller-friendly it’s been since well before the pandemic housing era.
And the elevated price levels that have supported agent income for years could become a casualty in many markets as inventory further rebalances.
A healthier path — and a looming risk
To understand where real estate stands right now, it’s essential to place data in context of where it stood before record-low mortgage rates and a pandemic-fueled demand boom completely warped the contours of the market.
But first, let’s take an extra close look at how the business has evolved in the last year alone.
Change in March-May levels, year-over-year
- New listings: +9%
- Listing outflow: +4%
- Weighted list price: +0.1%
- Potential commission pool: +4%
We see here the reason behind the buyer-friendly shift in most parts of the country: Not a decline in listing outflow — which is Inman’s proxy for sales activity — but a bump in new listings that outpaced a more modest increase in transactions.
From a brokerage-business perspective, this represents a healthier path through a rebalancing period than what happened in 2022, when the primary driver of the inventory shift was a precipitous drop in home sales.
Still, despite the recent replenishing of inventory, the national market is a far cry from normal.
As every real estate agent is painfully aware, mortgage rates remain elevated far above the rates most homeowners have locked in on their existing loans, and also well above the rate levels that made today’s price levels affordable for buyers.
Zooming out, we see how distorted the market remains compared to what we thought of as “normal” before the pandemic housing boom.
Change in March-May levels, vs. pre-pandemic baseline
Spring 2024 → Spring 2025
- New listings: -23% → -16%
- Listing outflow: -26% → -23%
- Weighted list price: +47% → +48%
- Potential commission pool: +10% → +14%
For the most part, price growth during the pandemic has held up even amid the downturn in sales, allowing many brokerages to weather the sales drought.
But it’s worth noting that while the raw value of the commission pool is technically higher than in the spring seasons of 2017-19, consumer-price inflation over that same period has more than offset these nominal gains. This means that in real terms, brokerage earnings are still worth less today than they were six years ago.
And downward pressure on prices may only be beginning.
The level of transaction activity on a typical active listing was 16 percent above pre-pandemic levels in spring of 2024. Even though the market had already substantially rebalanced by this point, this ensured that most markets remained deep seller’s markets.
This spring, the typical listing saw 7 percent less demand than it did pre-pandemic — taking substantial pressure off prices in the process.
As a national matter, the rebalancing toward buyers isn’t complete. After all, we were in a national seller’s market long before the pandemic.
But it does appear to be entering a new era — one where today’s buyers have a noticeably more prominent place at the table.
