What to Tell Buyers and Sellers in Today's Slower Market

Every agent's phone has been ringing with some version of the same two calls lately. One is a seller client, a little hurt, asking why their house has been sitting for three weeks when the place down the street "sold in a weekend" back in 2021. The other is a buyer client, tired and a little defeated, asking whether they should just wait it out until rates come down. Both are reasonable questions. Both come from people looking at a market that no longer behaves the way it did a few years ago, and both are, at their core, asking you the same thing: is now still a reasonable time to make a move?

It is a fair question, and it deserves a real answer instead of a reflexive "now is always a good time to buy or sell." The honest answer, and the heart of what to tell buyers and sellers right now, is that the ground has genuinely shifted, and the agents having the best conversations with clients right now are the ones who can explain that shift in plain language, back it up with real numbers, and help people make a decision that fits their actual life rather than a memory of 2021.

The numbers your clients are half-remembering

As of mid-September 2026, the average rate on a 30-year fixed mortgage sits at 6.95%, according to Freddie Mac's Primary Mortgage Market Survey. That is a long way from the sub-3% rates that a lot of buyer clients locked in during 2020 and 2021, and it is the number sitting underneath almost every "should I wait" conversation happening in the industry right now.

At the same time, inventory has been building. National existing-home inventory climbed to a 4.9-month supply in August, the highest level in more than a decade, and existing-home sales actually slipped 2.0% for the month, according to the National Association of Realtors. The median existing-home price is still climbing, but gently — up just 1.6% year-over-year, the 38th consecutive month of gains, but nothing like the leaps buyers and sellers got used to. That combination, more homes to choose from and rates that make monthly payments sting, is exactly why the market feels contradictory to a lot of clients: sellers feel like it should still be 2021, and buyers feel priced out anyway.

Sellers are also seeing more competition for offers than they're used to. Nationally, sellers gave buyers some form of concession — closing-cost credits, repair credits, rate buydowns — in 44.7% of August sales, up from 42.6% a year earlier, according to Redfin. Earlier in the year, more than a third of sellers (35.4% in April) had cut their asking price at least once, per Redfin's price-drop tracking. None of that means the market is bad. It means it is more normal than it has been in years, and normal takes some explaining when the last comparison point everyone has in their head is the strangest housing market of most of our careers.

"Why did my neighbor's house sell for so much more two years ago?"

The short answer: the neighbor got an unusual number in an unusual market, and that sale is the outlier, not the baseline. This is usually the first thing a seller says when a listing gets a slower start than expected, and it is worth sitting with instead of brushing past. Homes sold fast and high in 2021 and early 2022 because rates were near historic lows and buyers were competing hard for very little inventory, and that is the context the neighbor's number came from.

What helps here is showing, not just telling. Pulling a real comparative market analysis with current, active, and recently sold comps — not a screenshot from two years ago — turns an emotional conversation into a factual one. If pricing conversations with sellers tend to eat up your prep time, it's worth tightening that workflow; a faster CMA prep process means you can walk into that listing appointment with current numbers instead of guesswork, which matters more than ever when last year's comp is no longer a reliable guide.

The other piece worth naming out loud: a house that's priced and presented for today's buyers, not for 2021's, tends to move. The sellers who get frustrated are usually the ones anchored to a number instead of to the current comp set — and that anchor is exactly what the neighbor's old sale reinforces.

"Should I just wait for rates to drop?"

The honest answer is that nobody knows when rates will move, so the better question is whether buying now beats waiting once everything is counted, not just the rate. This is the buyer version of the same anchoring problem, and it deserves a genuinely patient answer rather than a sales pitch. What you can do is help a buyer client separate the two decisions they're actually making: whether to buy at all, and whether to buy this specific home at this specific rate.

If rates do fall meaningfully, most buyer clients can refinance later — that's a real, well-worn path. But home prices, even in a slower market, are still edging upward (that 1.6% annual gain reported by NAR isn't nothing), and today's elevated inventory and rising concession rate mean a buyer has more room to negotiate than they will once demand catches back up. Waiting for the "perfect" rate can mean trading a negotiable market for a competitive one. That's not a reason to push anyone into a purchase they're not ready for — it's a reason to make sure the buyer is weighing the whole picture, not just the rate headline.

A short table like this can be a useful thing to sketch out loud in a buyer consultation, not to hand over as homework:

"Why isn't my house getting offers like it would have in 2022?"

A house isn't getting 2022-style offers because almost nothing about the current market resembles 2022, and that's worth saying to a seller plainly. In 2022, low inventory and low rates meant buyers competed with each other. Today, buyers have options and are using them — asking for concessions, taking their time, comparing multiple listings before writing an offer. That's not a reflection on the seller's home; it's the shape of a market where supply has caught up.

Where this becomes a real client-service moment is speed and responsiveness once an offer does come in. In a market with more competing inventory, a buyer who doesn't hear back quickly often moves on to the next listing rather than waiting around, which makes fast, organized follow-up worth more than it used to be. Agents juggling multiple active listings and a slower pipeline of leads sometimes lean on AI and automation tools that help keep response times tight — the kind of thing covered in this breakdown of speed-to-lead practices for real estate teams — since a same-day response can be the difference between a showing and a pass in a market where buyers have plenty of other homes to look at.

Where the hours for these conversations come from

Every one of these buyer and seller talking points takes more time than the 2021 version of the same conversation did. A patient answer to "should I wait for rates to drop" is a twenty-minute conversation, not a text. For an independent brokerage, that time has to come from somewhere, and it usually comes out of the same hours agents were spending on paperwork, scheduling, and chasing signatures. That is the problem Loqol (loqol.ai), an AI and automation platform made for licensed brokerages, is built to solve. Its AI assistant, Charlie AI, automates the follow-up scheduling, drafts and assembles the disclosure packages and transaction files, tracks every deadline, lines up the vendors — inspectors, photographers, escrow — and crunches the market data into the plain-English numbers these conversations run on, so the agent walks in prepared and is the one actually sitting with the anxious seller or walking a buyer through the trade-offs. Marketing gets listing and email drafts from the same system, the TC gets a live project timeline for every file, and the admin gets the data entry done. For a brokerage owner, the practical effect of that kind of AI automation is more of these conversations per agent, with less prep time and no bigger back office behind them — which in a slower market is the closest thing to a margin lever that doesn't involve cutting anyone.

The conversation underneath the conversation

Most of what buyer and seller clients are actually anxious about isn't rates or inventory at all — it's whether they can trust the person telling them what those numbers mean. Nobody wants to feel like they got the "old" advice, the script from a market that no longer applies. The agents earning trust right now are the ones willing to say plainly: this is different from a few years ago, here's exactly how, and here's what it means for your specific situation, not a generic one.

That's also the version of this conversation that holds up over time. A seller who understands why their home is priced where it is, based on real comps and a real read of the market, is a seller who won't panic three weeks in. A buyer who understands the actual trade-off between waiting and buying is a buyer who won't blame you later for "letting" them wait too long or push too fast. Slower markets reward agents who explain themselves — and those are usually the same agents whose clients refer them to the next buyer or seller who's confused about all of this, too.

More on what to tell buyers and sellers as conditions shift, built around what's actually happening in the market rather than what used to be true, lives on the Loqol resources hub.