When Is Best Time To Sell A Home?

This is the question of all questions when it comes to real estate. As a professional agent and marketing specialist, I talk to homeowners during every month of the year that are hoping to “time the market” to sell the home for as much as possible.

The common misconception is that you will sell a home for more money during one season as opposed to another one. Unfortunately, we’ve never found any data whatsoever to support that in this area.

In some areas of the country, there are more buyers in the Summertime and in other areas, the Wintertime is the big season. But guess what??? When there are more buyers, there are also more sellers trying to sell. As a matter of fact, most of those buyers also put their current property on the market so that they can make the move.

The most ridiculous thing anyone can do when making a move for their primary residence is to try to “time the market” in lieu of making the move when the family needs change.

In real estate, we know that most people have a housing need change when they go through a life change. In other words, a birth or death in the family, a job promotion or a job loss, children heading off to college, a marriage or divorce and other things of this nature. When there’s a life change, it creates a housing need change. The last thing you’d ever want to do is wait until “the hot market” time in the area. The truth is, everything is based on supply and demand and your home won’t sell for more money when there are 5 times as many homes available for sale in your neighborhood.

As a matter of fact, due to the competition, I’ve personally witnessed this having a negative effect on home prices because after all, you probably don’t really NEED to sell your home so someone will always be a heck of a lot more motivated to unload their home than you are. That creates a downward pressure on asking prices.

In reality, if you are going to be utilizing a mortgage when buying your next home, you want to time the market by timing YOUR expenses which is the interest rate. Since rates are going up and it appears that will continue to happen for the next several years, the absolute BEST time to buy a home was 3 months ago. The next best time is right now. Waiting a year or two can cause you to pay several hundred dollars per month more in the form of a higher interest rate.

While nobody can precisely predict the future of the economy in any country, it’s safe to say that rates will never go any lower than they’ve been lately. After all, for all of us still living and breathing, we’ve never seen anything like this before throughout our adult lives.

It may be wise to find that new place sooner, rather than later. If you feel like your family deserves a bigger home and could really utilize the extra space, now is the time for us to start casually looking around with no commitment of officially making a move. But for my clients, I want to ensure they don’t wait until rates are way up again and it prices them out of the ability to secure a larger home for the same monthly payment they have now.