By Eric Bramlett

June 02, 2026

Heading into spring 2026, market optimism was reasonably grounded. Rates had briefly dipped below 6 percent in February, inventory was slowly rebuilding, and the National Association of Realtors’ chief economist was projecting a 14 percent jump in existing home sales for the year.

Then March arrived, and existing home sales hit a nine-month low of 3.98 million, the slowest March pace since 2009.

What happened, and what agents need to do about it, are worth separating. The first is mostly context. The second is the job.

 The buyer-seller standoff is still the story.

The most persistent dynamic in this market is a valuation gap that neither side is willing to close. Sellers are still anchoring to peak-era pricing. In Zillow’s quarterly agent sentiment survey, respondents described sellers as stubborn about price expectations, with one telling Zillow that sellers still expected to “get triple the asking price.” That’s an outlier in phrasing, but not in sentiment.

On the other side, buyers aren’t panicking. They’re waiting. April’s existing home sales ticked up just 0.2 percent month-over-month, with NAR noting that days on market are lengthening as consumers take more time before making decisions. And home sales were essentially flat in April compared with a year earlier, even as newly listed homes rose at a faster pace than sales. More inventory, more hesitation. That combination tells you buyers don’t feel urgency. And without urgency, most don’t move. 

Affordability improved, then got worse again.

Rates bottomed near 5.95 percent early in the year, briefly creating the best affordability conditions in four years. Then came the Iran War. According to ICE’s April Mortgage Monitor, 30-year rates rose roughly 40 basis points from that floor, pulling approximately four percent of buying power back out of the market right as the spring season kicked off.

NAR later revised its 2026 forecast from 14 percent sales growth down to 4 percent, citing that rate increase as the primary driver.But rates are only part of it. NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun noted in April that despite a record-high stock market, consumer confidence was historically low, and buyers were taking their time before committing. New home sales fell 6.2 percent from March to April and 11.3 percent year-over-year, with NAHB’s chief economist projecting further declines ahead. When qualified buyers have financial capacity but lack confidence, rate cuts alone won’t get them off the sidelines. The decision calculus has shifted, and agents who treat this as a rate problem are misreading it.

The market you have Nancy Vanden Houten, lead economist at Oxford Economics, expects home sales to “move sideways before starting to gradually rise at the end of the year.” That’s a realistic planning horizon, in my view. The agents I respect most right now aren’t waiting for the market to turn. They’re doing the harder work of managing expectations clearly, staying close to their clients and building the kind of trust that has a long shelf life. That’s what good brokerage looks like in a market like this one.