Nicole Friedman

A lot of people keep their licenses even if they find work elsewhere because they want to keep a foot in the door.

Maybe the market will pick back up.

NAR does do a survey every year of real estate agents and they ask them if real estate is your only profession.

And in 2025, 71% of real estate agents said that real estate was their only occupation.

And that's the lowest level on record in 20 years of asking this survey question.

More agents are finding work elsewhere or not working full time in the real estate industry.

A lot of people say they're going back to whatever field they came from.

Maybe they were a nurse before or a teacher or they worked in sales or retail, hospitality.

Or people, you know, sometimes can find like real estate adjacent work, maybe doing staging or something like that.

We had the war in the Middle East, the turmoil with shipping and gas prices and inflation expectations, and rates have climbed again, and that's kind of stalled out that momentum.

This is the spring home buying season, which is typically the busiest time of year for home sales.

And a lot of families, they want to move

over the summer, between school years.

So if they decide not to purchase in the spring, they might just wait a whole year.

And so the expectation now is that this is going to be another slow spring and kind of not a recovery year for the housing market.

Given that the March numbers weren't very good, it's really not a good sign for what we can expect in April and even into May.

So this is a pretty bad sign for the rest of the year because spring is such an important time in the housing market.

It's surprising because the March home sales mostly reflect people who are actually out shopping in January and February.

And so what this shows is that even when rates were falling, that just wasn't enough to actually jumpstart home sales activity.

Buyers are kind of still just freaked out about the economy.