The number came out on Tuesday, and it wasn't pretty.
NAR's Pending Home Sales Index fell 7.3% in September to 66.0, the lowest reading since the index began in 2001. Contracts dropped in all four regions and were down 11.3% from a year earlier. Economists had expected a slip of about half a percent. NAR's chief economist, Lawrence Yun, put it plainly: "Market conditions weakened in September due to fast-rising mortgage rates." Freddie Mac had the 30-year fixed averaging 7.40% last week, the highest in nearly three years.
Pending sales become closings a month or two later. So the slowdown agents are feeling now will show up in closed numbers through the winter.
I've been through markets like this before. If you have too, you know what comes next.
Slow markets thin the ranks
When deals are easy, almost anyone with a license can stay busy. When they get hard, the gap between agents who run a business and agents who wait for the phone to ring opens up fast.
Some agents leave the business. Some go part-time. Some hang on, waiting for rates to come back down. And a smaller group does something different: they get better. They pick up market share from the agents who stepped back. When the market turns, and it always does, they're the ones with the referrals, the reputation and the systems already in place.
In my experience, the agents in that last group do three things.
1. They lean into the business
Busy markets hide a lot. In a slow one, every deal matters more and every lost deal hurts more.
The agents who thrive know their numbers: how many conversations turn into appointments, how many appointments turn into contracts, and what it costs them to close one. They protect the deals they have, because a contract that falls apart in October may not be replaced until spring.
That means knowing the contract cold. In a high-rate market, more deals run into appraisal gaps, loan trouble and nervous buyers in the inspection period. The agent who knows exactly what the contract says about each of those, and when each deadline hits, is the one who keeps the deal together. The agent who has to "check and get back to you" is the one who loses it.
2. They lean into homeownership, for the people who want it
People still get married, have kids, take new jobs, downsize and move closer to family. Life doesn't wait for a better rate.
The best agents don't talk anyone into buying. But they don't disappear on the buyers and sellers who still need to move, either. They help clients see the whole picture: what a payment looks like at today's rates, what the seller might be willing to negotiate, and what questions to bring to a lender. They bring in good lenders early and let the client decide with real information, not headlines.
A record-low month also means less competition for the buyers who are ready. For someone who plans to stay put for years, that can matter as much as the rate. The agent's job is to lay out the trade-offs honestly, then do excellent work for the clients who decide to go ahead.
3. They lean into technology
In every downturn I've seen, the agents who came out ahead were the ones who did more with less: fewer hours on busywork, more hours with clients.
That's truer now than ever. The tools have changed. An agent no longer has to dig through a 10-page contract to find a deadline, or wait for the broker to call back on a policy question while the client waits. Good technology gives that time back, and in a slow market time is the one thing every agent can't afford to waste.
Where RETEQ fits
This is why we built RETEQ.
When an agent has a question about an Arizona contract, a statute or their brokerage's own policy, RETEQ answers it from the source and shows exactly where the answer came from: the form, the line, the policy. If there's no source to back up an answer, it says so instead of guessing. When a client asks, "Can we still cancel if it doesn't appraise?", the agent can answer in the moment, correctly, and show the clause.
Once a deal is under contract, RETEQ works out the deadlines from the contract dates, so nothing slips. And it gives brokers one view of every deal in the brokerage that needs attention.
None of that replaces an agent's judgment, their broker or their client relationships. It gives agents a source of truth they can rely on, so they can spend their time on what wins in a market like this: serving buyers and sellers well.
Slow markets don't last. The agents who use them to get sharper will be the ones everyone's calling when this one turns.
Link to Yahoo Finance article:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/us-pending-home-sales-tumble-140050518.html
