Are the Holidays a Good or Bad Time to Sell a Home?
Are the Holidays a Good or Bad Time to Sell a Home?
I have included a recent article below that caught my attention on listing/selling properties during the winter holidays. Are the Holidays a Good or Bad Time to Sell a Home? The article states that from their research, properties often sell quite well during this busy season.
When I lived in San Francisco, many of the properties were taken off the market during the holiday season. Many realtors were away and unreachable for showings and open houses. It is precisely at this time when I sold several properties each during the time between Thanksgiving & New Years. I had showings every weekend with less competition.
Santa Fe is a tourist market and during the heavy traffic tourist season there are more potential buyers in town with time on their hands. Winter is such a joyful and fairly pleasant time of year when people are outside and taking in lots of activities. In other parts of the country where temperatures are below freezing most of the time with many feet of snow, it makes it hard to imagine touring properties and engaging in contemplating moving into an area with extreme climate conditions. We are so fortunate to have such great winter weather, light snow, cool refreshing high desert air.
Taking advantage of this location, as a realtor, it means I am accessible when the opportunities arise. This is a great time of year for buyers to seriously consider making their home here and I am available to help with negotiations and handle the transaction from start to beyond closing.
So if you are debating showing during the holidays, you might want to think about your target market and let me help you market your property, not just list it.
Is it a correct observation or a misconception that it is a disadvantage to list your home for sale during the holiday period? Conventional belief has generally been that November-December is the worst time of the year to have a home on the market. The reasons for this thinking are that people go on vacation, holidays distract attention, bad weather may inhibit some buyers, and many real estate agents discourage home sellers from winter listings.
A long-standing practice of real estate professionals is to take homes off the market before Thanksgiving in order to “refresh” the listing for the New Year, and then relisting it in the spring. Agents may also tell homeowners who are thinking of putting their home on the market to wait until March, since more homes sell better at that time of the year.
The fact is if someone wants to sell their home, there are a number of reasons and advantages to putting it on the market during the end of year/winter season. More than 90 percent of the home buyers do their initial searching online, and mostly do so in the evenings. Even if they are out of town visiting relatives, they have internet access. A growing number of home seekers are far more mobile, and are looking for homes more frequently as relocation for professional reasons is imperative. People who are searching online can only look at the current inventory available. These buyers will choose from the homes that are actively listed at they time they are in the market to buy. Therefore, those that are not listed will miss consideration.
There may be fewer showings during November-December than many other times of the year. However, those potential buyers who are looking at homes then may be more motivated and serious about buying and some buyers will actually have more time to look at homes during the holiday period. Because they have fewer homes to select from with the lower inventory level, any seller whose home is on the market will have less competition.
To validate the suggestion that the end of year period is really an advantageous time to be on the market, a review of the holiday season home sales in 2013 provides substantial evidence that this is true. Using Brentwood as the marketplace to analyze this, an average of 16 new escrows were opened each of the two winter months in 2013, versus 23 per month average the preceding 10 months. Further analysis revealed that 70 percent of those winter-contracts were put on the market and entered escrow between Nov. 1 and Jan. 1, and involved multiple offers. And having reviewed my own sales record, we have found that in 15 of the last 19 years I have had transactions begin during that holiday period. Though it may seem counter intuitive, it well may be that the end of the year/winter season is an excellent time to be in the market place.
