Pending sales just dropped 8.5%. Here's how to keep earning.
Zillow called it an early winter this week. Newly pending sales fell 8.5% from a year ago in September and 11.2% from August, and Zillow expects sales to stay below last year through the fourth quarter. For a lot of agents, that means October looks lighter than planned. A lighter calendar doesn’t have to mean a lighter month. The agents who finish Q4 strong are the ones who treat their open hours as paid hours, not downtime.
THIS WEEK'S PRO TIP:
TREAT YOUR OPEN HOURS LIKE INVENTORY
Block your open windows before the week starts. Look at Monday through Saturday and mark every stretch where you’re not showing, listing, or closing. Two free hours on a Tuesday afternoon is enough for a showing and a lockbox run. If it isn’t on the calendar, it gets eaten by email.
Then fill those windows on purpose. Open KeyPleaz® at the start of each block and claim the showings, open houses, and lockbox runs that fit the time and the drive. Stick close to the neighborhoods you already work so the miles stay low and the hours stay paid.
When you're busy: A slower market doesn’t slow down the buyer who’s ready. With fewer contracts getting signed, the showing request that lands while you’re across town matters more than it did in the spring. Post it on KeyPleaz® and let an agent with an open afternoon cover it, so your buyer isn’t left waiting.
When you're available: If your own pipeline thinned out this fall, the work didn’t disappear. It moved to other agents’ calendars. Open KeyPleaz® and claim the showings, open houses, and lockbox runs they can’t get to. It’s paid work you can stack between your own deals, and it keeps you in the field while the market is quiet.
MARKET NEWS PULSE
Fewer buyers are signing, even with more homes to choose from. Newly pending sales fell 8.5% year over year in September per Zillow, and Realtor.com counted 4.1% fewer homes under contract than a year ago, the steepest annual drop since March 2025. Supply is moving the other way, with active listings up 5.4% to about 1.16 million and the gap to pre-pandemic inventory down to 9.1%, the first reading under 10% of this recovery, per Realtor.com. The typical listing has now been on the market 61 days per Realtor.com, and homes that did sell took a median 29 days to go pending, two days longer than last year, per Zillow. Zillow expects sales to stay below last year’s pace through the fourth quarter. More listings and fewer contracts means more homes to show for every deal that closes, and more legwork per paycheck.
QUICK STAT OF THE WEEK
9 transaction sides. That’s what the typical individual agent closed in 2025, per NAR’s 2026 Member Profile. Spread across a year, it works out to about one closing every six weeks, with a lot of open days in between. Those in-between days are where claimed tasks earn, a showing here and a lockbox run there, paid work that fits around your own deals.
Open the app and claim your first task of the week.
