The Votes Are In. The Best Time to Sell Your House Is …

You were all pretty excited about my post yesterday suggesting that home sales weren’t really all that seasonal. Admit it. You were enthralled.

Unfortunately, I only had data for new home sales, not the much larger number of existing homes sold each month. Well, today I have it. Here it is:

It appears that there’s a bit more seasonality in sales of existing homes than in sales of new homes. I’d guess that this is a supply-side thing: builders want to sell new homes whenever they’re finished, while homeowners wait until spring to sell their homes. Is this because most of us don’t want to sell in winter? Or because realtors tell us that markets are terrible in winter, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy? I don’t know. But perhaps realtors don’t like trudging around in the snow any more than the rest of us.

In any case, if you add up both new and existing homes, here’s what you get:

  • Spring:  26.5 percent of all home sales
  • Summer: 29.6 percent
  • Autumn: 24.1 percent
  • Winter: 19.8 percent

In other words, winter sucks, but spring, summer and autumn are all about the same.

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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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