The Quarterly Index: Buy-Side Real Estate Performance Enters the Public Record

A Standing Measure for a Market That Never Had One

Every functioning market has a public measure of who performs. Equities have quarterly earnings. Sports have weekly rankings. Listing-side real estate has a constant stream of monthly inventory and price reports. Buy-side real estate has had none of this. Until now, the performance of buyer’s agents and teams was tracked only inside private brokerages, fragmented across data sources, and visible only to insiders willing to do the manual work to assemble it.

Today we are releasing the first installment of a new standing measure. Beginning this week, Agent Pronto and CINC are publishing quarterly buy-side performance rankings for the top 25 buyer’s agents and teams in every state, covering Q1 2026 transactions. The first ten states are live now. The remaining forty will publish over the next five weeks. From this point forward, we will refresh the index every quarter, in every state.

This is the first quarterly, all-state buy-side performance index ever produced. Our 2025 annual analysis established the methodology in five states. The Q1 2026 release extends that work to national coverage and to a cadence that matches how the industry actually moves.

Why Cadence Matters More Than Snapshots

Annual reports are useful, but they are also forgiving. A single strong quarter can carry a weak year. A single weak quarter can hide inside an otherwise solid annual figure. Quarterly measurement removes that cover. It shows which agents and teams are sustaining performance and which are coasting on a prior period.

Cadence also changes how the data gets used. An annual report is a reference document. A quarterly index becomes an operating input. Brokerages can recruit against it in close to real time. Team leaders can benchmark their performance against the published top of the market while a quarter is still recoverable. Home shoppers researching representation can see who is closing transactions in their state right now rather than who closed transactions fourteen months ago. The data shifts from historical curiosity to current intelligence.

Listing-side reporting went through a similar transition years ago, from infrequent industry summaries to regular public measurement that the entire market now treats as infrastructure. Quarterly buy-side measurement is that same step, applied to the half of every transaction that has never had it.

Q1 2026: The First Quarter of the Settled Era

Q1 2026 matters because of what it captures. The NAR settlement took effect in August 2024. The eighteen months that followed were a transition period. Written buyer agreements went from novelty to requirement. Compensation conversations moved from implicit to explicit. Agents and teams adjusted their consultation processes, their marketing, and their value articulation. Some adapted quickly. Some did not.

Q1 2026 is the first full quarter operating entirely under the post-settlement rules. The written buyer agreements, the explicit compensation conversations, the new consultation processes, none of these are still being phased in. They are simply how the business works. The performance data from this quarter is the first clean read on who is winning under the settled rules rather than who weathered the transition.

The state-level articles in this release explore that question market by market. Each one examines what happened to inventory, supply, prices, and days on market across the three months of the quarter, then ranks the top 25 buyer’s agents and teams in that state by total transaction volume. The composition of those rankings is where the post-settlement story is told. In Georgia, one of the first states we published, the top 25 spans the full range of price points the state serves. Eight agents and teams hold median transaction prices under $500,000. Five hold medians at or above $2 million. The volume leader closed 55 transactions at a $268,000 median. The eleventh-ranked agent closed two transactions at a $5 million median and reached nearly the same total dollar volume. The same ranking accommodates both, alongside agents and teams operating everywhere in between. No single approach defines the top of the market.

That diversity is not unique to Georgia, and the patterns it reveals are what quarterly tracking is designed to capture. Whether the same agents hold their positions across quarters, whether high-volume specialists or luxury specialists are gaining ground in a given market, whether the gap between top performers and the median is widening or narrowing, these are the questions the index will answer over time. Q1 2026 is the baseline. Q2 will be the first comparison.

What We Measure and How

The rankings cover the top 25 buyer’s agents and teams in each state by total buy-side transaction volume in Q1 2026, ordered by total dollar volume closed. State articles report the closing count, total dollar volume, and median sale price for every ranked agent and team. Each article also reports the state’s market context for the same period: inventory, months of supply, median sale price, and days on market across the three months, with a year-over-year comparison against Q1 2025.

Market data is provided by Redfin. Buy-side transaction data is provided exclusively by Agent Pronto and CINC, which aggregates buy-side activity nationwide to produce the rankings. Rankings reflect available transaction records and may not capture every buy-side transaction in every market. Agents and teams not represented in a given state’s top 25 may have comparable or superior performance not reflected in our sources. We say this directly in every state article and we will say it here as well. Transparency about the limits of the data is part of what makes the index credible.

We rank on closed transactions rather than self-reported production. Individual agents and teams appear together in a single ranked list, ordered by total dollar volume, which is the buy-side equivalent of how listing-side production is conventionally measured. We do not separate or weight by transaction count, because doing so would obscure the legitimate variety of paths to top performance that the data reveals.

The Stakes for the Industry

When performance becomes measurable on a regular cadence, the conversation about value changes. Buyer’s agents and teams who can point to a quarterly ranking have a concrete answer to the buyer who asks why representation costs what it costs. Brokerages competing for recruits have a concrete answer to the producer asking what kind of company they are joining. Home shoppers have a concrete answer to the question of who to trust with the largest purchase they will ever make.

This is what professionalization looks like in practice. Not a credential or a designation, but a public, recurring, accountable measure of who is doing the work well. The industries that have public performance measurement tend to elevate their best practitioners. The buy-side of real estate has spent a long time without that elevation.

That changes today, and every ninety days from here on.

Data Sources:

Market Data: Provided by Redfin, a national real estate brokerage.

Buy-Side Transaction Data: Provided exclusively by Agent Pronto/CINC, the industry’s leading source for buyer’s agent and team performance intelligence. Agent Pronto/CINC aggregates buy-side transaction data nationwide to deliver comprehensive rankings and performance metrics.

Disclaimer: While Agent Pronto/CINC makes every effort to ensure data accuracy, rankings are based on available transaction records and may not capture all buy-side activity. Agents or teams not included in these rankings may have comparable or superior performance not reflected in our data sources.

Analysis Period: January 2026 - March 2026