When it comes to buying a home, 88% of buyers turn to real estate professionals for guidance.
This stat alone underscores just how essential agents remain in the process, even in an era of online listings and digital transactions.
That’s according to NAR’s 2025 Home Buyers and Sellers Generational Trends Report, which once again proves that, despite shifts in technology and consumer behavior, real estate agents continue to play a pivotal role.
But there’s a disconnect between what buyers want most from their agents and what they’re actually getting.
Read on for the highlights from NAR’s research.
The Gap Between Expectation and Reality
NAR’s 2025 report reinforces the same key finding from the year before: The number one thing buyers want from their agent is help finding the right home. Yet only 29% of buyers actually find their home through their agent.
This raises two critical questions:
- What exactly do buyers expect from their agents?
- What needs to change for agents to close the gap and provide the service buyers value most?
Let’s break it down.
How Buyers Find and Choose Their Agents
Real estate remains a relationship-driven business, with referrals leading the way in how buyers connect with agents:
- 54% of Younger Millennials and 42% of Older Millennials were referred to their agent by a friend, neighbor, or relative.
- Older buyers were more likely to return to an agent they had previously worked with.
- 75% of all buyers contacted only one agent before signing a contract; another 16% contacted two.
When selecting an agent, buyers prioritized:
- Experience – Knowledge and expertise mattered across all generations.
- Honesty and trustworthiness – Integrity played a key role in decision-making.
- Reputation – Especially important to the Silent Generation and Younger Millennials.
What Buyers Want Most From Their Agents
According to NAR’s research, 49% of all buyers say the #1 thing they want their real estate agent to do is help them find the right home.
Top 10 Things Buyers Want From Agents:
- Help finding the right home – 49%
- Help negotiating the terms of sale – 14%
- Help with price negotiations – 11%
- Help with paperwork – 7%
- Determine what comparable homes were selling for – 7%
- Help determining how much they can afford – 4%
- Help finding and arranging financing – 3%
- Help learning about the neighborhood (restaurants, parks, etc.) – 2%
- Help finding renters for their property – <1%
- Other services – 3%
Why is “help finding the right home” at the top? Because buyers also ranked it as the most difficult step in the home buying process.
Top 5 Most Difficult Steps in Home Buying:
- Finding the right property – 55%
- Paperwork – 17%
- Understanding the process and steps – 15%
- Saving for the down payment – 12%
- Getting a mortgage – 8%
Why More Than Half of Buyers Find Their Home Online
Despite wanting their agent to help them find the right home, 51% of buyers found their home on the internet, with just 29% saying they found it through their agent.
Where Buyers Found the Home They Purchased:
- Internet – 51%
- Real estate agent – 29%
- Friend, relative, or neighbor – 8%
- Home builder or their agent – 5%
- Yard sign/open house sign – 4%
- Directly from sellers/Knew the sellers – 4%
- Other – <1%
What Agents Need to Address
There’s no doubt real estate agents do plenty of other things to help buyers throughout the home buying process, including:
- Setting up home tours and helping the buyer identify homes that meet their needs
- Assisting with writing up offers
- Negotiating price with the listing agent
- Walking buyers through contracts (decoding jargon), so they know what they’re signing
- Having their back and taking effective action when things go wrong
The main issue? Too many agents expect buyers to do the heavy lifting of searching for homes online. If you’re waiting for buyers to send you Zillow links instead of actively searching for them, you’re leaving a gap wide open for frustration—and lost deals.
Here’s how top agents close that gap:
- They proactively search for homes based on their clients’ criteria. This is one area where Mosaik can help by automating a targeted home search for each buyer. In-app messaging and tour coordination, plus detailed property comparisons, make it easy to collaborate with your clients and keep each other in the loop throughout the process.
- They don’t wait for buyers to send them listings—they send options first.
- They leverage market knowledge to find off-market and coming-soon listings.
- They curate and narrow options to avoid overwhelming buyers.
Yes, buyers will still browse Zillow. But the best agents make sure their clients never feel like they have to do all the work themselves.
None of the services buyers want from their agent are things they’d rather do on their own. If they wanted to go solo, they wouldn’t hire an agent in the first place.
So the real question is: What are you doing to help your buyers find the right home—before they find it without you?
