If it feels like more deals are falling apart lately, it’s not just the market. There is a deeper shift happening beneath the surface, and it has to do with how today’s buyers earn their income.
A 2025 Glassdoor report found that 57% of Gen Z workers now have at least one side hustle. Similar trends are visible among millennials, with a late 2024 TransUnion report showing that 78% of millennials earn income from one or more gig platforms.
For many buyers, income is no longer sourced from a single employer or a predictable paycheck. Instead, it is made up of multiple streams—self-employment, freelance work, commissions, partnerships, and other non-traditional sources.
This shift is changing what a “qualified buyer” looks like. Many buyers today have the financial ability to purchase a home, but their income does not fit neatly into the systems most lenders are still using. Lenders’ underwriters require CPA level skills to analyze their income and determine what information to feed into DU and LP. What used to be considered an outlier or a complex scenario has become the norm.
While the buyer has evolved, the process used to evaluate them has not. Traditional methods were designed for simple income profiles, not for buyers with multiple schedules, K-1s, or variable earnings across different sources.
As a result, there is a growing gap between what buyers actually earn and how much of that income is being considered. Because nearly two-thirds of GSE repurchase demands stem from income-related errors, lenders have responded in ways that result in disparate outcomes for the borrower. These lenders either disregard valid income sources or miscalculate income that doesn’t align with their Loan Origination Systems (LOS). As a result, many qualified families are routinely denied access to housing.
Compounding that issue, complex income significantly increases the time required for calculation and validation, introducing delays that put deals at risk. Files with multiple income sources often require repeated documentation requests, multiple rounds of review, and ongoing clarification, turning what should be a straightforward determination into a process that can take days—sometimes longer—as conditions continue to evolve.
That delay has real consequences. As income evaluation drags out, buyers lose confidence, sellers become less patient, and negotiations grow more fragile. Deals that appeared solid at the outset begin to weaken, not because the buyer cannot qualify, but because the process cannot keep up. Recent data underscores just how widespread this issue has become.
Nearly 14% of home-sale agreements fell through in February alone, according to recent industry data reported by WRE News. That is the highest level on record for that month—highlighting just how fragile transactions have become in today’s market.
AngelAi’s latest app, Angel Income, was built to solve this problem at its source. Instead of relying on slow, manual interpretation, Angel Income analyzes buyer income the way it actually exists today, extracting and interpreting data across tax returns, schedules, and K-1s to ensure that all usable income is captured and accurately calculated.
What sets it apart is not only accuracy, but speed. Scenarios that would traditionally require multiple rounds of review and several days of back-and-forth can now be completed in minutes. More importantly, the output is a warranted answer—definitive, transparent, and reliable—eliminating the ambiguity that often slows decisions and introduces risk into the process.
For real estate agents, this changes the entire experience of working a deal. Buyers are better understood from the start, approvals are more dependable, and transactions are far less likely to unravel late in the process. Instead of reacting to issues as they arise, agents can move forward with greater confidence and fewer surprises.
As this shift continues to reshape transactions across the industry, it is becoming a growing focus of discussion among real estate professionals. This topic was explored further in a webinar hosted by WRE, which also included an in-depth walkthrough of how Angel Income can be used to quickly analyze complex borrower income so that real estate professionals know from the beginning what their clients qualify for.
In a market where every deal requires more effort to get under contract and more certainty to reach closing, success is not just about finding buyers, it is about ensuring their income holds up throughout the transaction. Today’s buyers have not become less qualified—they have become more complex. The agents who understand that shift, and who work with solutions that deliver fast, definitive answers, will be the ones who prevail and close more deals.
Pavan Agarawal is the creator of AngelAi
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