- Tom Brezsny“March Madness” in the Real Estate Market
Remember, those many months ago, way back in the autumnal fastness of last October, when I was getting my nag on and bugging everyone thinking about selling a home to be proactive, get a game plan together and start doing all the things they should be doing to get their home ready? All so that they’d be ready when the exact right moment rolled around in 2025?
Well, guess what? That perfect moment has arrived! That day is March 1st, 2025. And ready or not, there will never be a better time to put your house on the market in Santa Cruz County. At least not this year.
This is the official start of what I’ve always whimsically called “March Madness” in the real estate market because in most years, this is usually the magic moment in time when all the cosmic tumblers align to flip the switch and push the pace of the market into the stratosphere.
If the pattern holds, the real estate market will be crazy-busy for the next thirty days and we will all be experiencing heavier than normal call, showing and sales volume as the competition increases, the intensity ratchets up and the prices shoot through the roof. For Sale signs that appear will be swallowed up by a rapidly expanding cohort of buyers that’s coming out in droves to scour neighborhoods, pack open houses and make over full-price offers.
By the time the frenzy subsides, many of those buyers will have succumbed to what is always a buyer’s biggest fear when they are in a sellers market: If they don’t buy now. They will be priced out of the market forever. And when that happens, the lion’s share of however much our coastal market is destined to appreciate in 2025, will already be locked in for the year. By April or May, the fever will break and the market’s descent into madness will be over as the inventory climbs and prices begin to flatten out.
I’m hoping that at least some of you took my advice last fall and are ready to hit the ground running as all this craziness unfolds . , . Of course, I say that knowing that only a fraction of those who hoped to be ready are actually ready to launch.
Despite the best laid plans of sellers, March always arrives too quickly. There are always more things to do than you imagined. And it’s always harder than it should be to get anyone out to fix anything. And when it comes to selling a house and navigating big life changes, it’s always easier to kick the can down the road until next year.
