Buying or Selling Homes in Real Estate’s “Off Season”

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Today I’ll be talking about buying and selling real estate after the peak season. So something that I’ve always been interested in is, one thing I love to track is the seasonality of sales, and I will share this with everybody. What is the typical seasonality of sales and what are most typical Realtors doing?

The first question you get when you go on a listing appointment is when should I put my house on the market? You may be asking that same question if you’re interested in selling your house like when do I do this? And your standard answer is the springtime. Spring and summer. Why? Because everything greens up, that’s when all the buyers come up to the marketplace and they’re looking to move for school, for work, or whatever it might be. That’s the assumption. Reality is different from the assumption. In fact over the past couple of decades, homes actually sell more in the fall and winter than we do in the spring and the summer.

Here’s why: It’s because most real estate professionals and most sellers hibernate like bears during the winter, and because everybody has been trained, and works under that false assumption that buyers aren’t buying houses in the in the winter. That couldn’t be further from the truth, and so because you got people hibernating, your supply and your inventory is actually down, which as a seller is perfect. That is the best market for you, because now you’re not competing with as much inventory as you would with all the properties coming to the market in the spring and summer.

Not only that the buyers who are looking to buy during the winter. They’re really motivated to buy. They’re out there looking for houses to buy, and if you have a house that is one of the few homes on the market in the winter because everybody else has hibernated, well, it gives you a competitive advantage. Crazy thing is production during the winter and fall months is around 50% for the entire year.