How Do Seasons Affect When to Sell Your Home? #4

 

Seasons Can Really Influence When to Sell A House!

Spring is typically the best time of year to list your home for sale — at least in the years before the pandemic-fueled housing boom. It’s when buyers tend to come out of winter hibernation and hit the market in droves. 

It remains an open question whether 2021 will bring a return to normalcy in that sense. It’s likely that seasonality in the housing market will remain in some form, even if the changes from season to season are less dramatic than in the past.  

Selling a house in the spring

As you can see from the trends above, people tend to shop for homes as the weather gets warmer, so prepping your home in the winter months to sell in spring usually makes sense. With tax refunds in their pockets, nicer weather for moving in the forecast, and summer break from the kids’ school coming up, it’s easy to see why spring is typically the most popular time to buy and sell.

Selling a house in the summer

Many of the same reasons buyers shop in the spring apply to home buying in summer as well — warm weather, school breaks, and simply having more hours of sunshine to hit up open houses and take home tours. Of course, summer is the time when most people take their vacations, so that might account for a bit of a slowdown. And, there are parts of the country where real estate is slow in the summer because it’s simply too hot to shop comfortably.

Selling a house in the fall

Many buyers shopping in the early fall may be trying to move in time to get settled before the school year picks up or before the weather gets bad, and that feeling of urgency can be a benefit to sellers. However, many off-season shoppers are moving because of a job transfer, layoff, short sale, or family issue, so they can also be more sensitive to price.

Selling a house in the winter

While winter is traditionally the slowest season for home sales, if your climate is warm year-round (think Florida and the Southwest), your window for selling may even be better in the winter months as snowbirds flock to the sunshine.