Summer is the best time for sellers to list
Continuing the conversation… digging deeper into the long held belief that summer is the best time for sellers to list and sell a house. The reasons? Tax time is over, the weather is better, kids are out of school and buyers have added pressure to find something before the start of the next school year.
All that sounds plausible… except that… looking at the market data going back to the last decade, it’s pretty clear that the summer months aren’t the window of time when sellers usually get the best results. In fact, statistically speaking, summer is the worst time to try to sell a home!
What the sales metrics say is that March actually ranks as the top month to list a home. That’s when all the most important stats align on the sellers’ side of the equation: higher median and average price points, fewer days on market, higher sale price to list price ratios and higher percentages of active listings that sold versus those that didn’t.
It’s also clear that as the market inches forward from March/April towards July/August, sales results get progressively worse for sellers each month. The conclusion? It turns out that summer is the best time for buyers to buy a house, not for sellers to sell one. Since the market exists as an ongoing negotiation between sellers and buyers, it can’t be beneficial for both at the same time.
So how do we wrap our heads around all of this? How can we account for the consistent patterns in the data? Why would the market be better for buyers in the summer months while favoring sellers in the spring months? For answers, we have to return to something I’ve written a lot about over the last decade: INVENTORY!
Right now, our market is at or near the tail end of thirteen straight years of appreciation. Starting in March of 2013, market activity took off unexpectedly out of the low ebb of the Great Recession. Since then prices have risen faster, higher and longer than anyone could have ever dreamed. (Average home price in 2013 was $500k and today it is $1.5m.)
While home prices were skyrocketing, the number of listings was also dropping into record low territory. Each year up until 2023, the market reached successive new historical lows for available inventory. And increasing competition for a decreasing number of homes drove prices through the roof and reshaped the way that the whole real estate process works. (Think multiple offers, over bids, fewer contingencies, quick escrows, all cash offers – all things we now associate with a “normal” market.)
Next Week: How inventory affects buyers….
