When is the best time to sell a property?
The school holidays are almost upon us, signalling the start of what is traditionally one of the quietest times of year for estate agents. If you are looking to sell a property, getting your timing right can be vital, says Kirsty Burnham, head of property at Movewise.
Movewise is the official sales partner of the NRLA. If you are looking to sell a property, you can register your interest here.
When is the right time to sell your home? For many people, the answer is “as soon as possible!” – but if you have the luxury of time and want the best chance of finding a buyer at the best price, it can pay to choose your moment. The traditional advice for sellers is that spring is the prime time to list a property, as warmer weather tempts buyers out of hibernation and gardens start to look pretty for those all-important photographs. But does that still hold true?
While there are a lot of factors at play when selling property, the most fundamental one is supply versus demand: the best time to sell is when demand is highest and supply is lowest. The hard part is knowing when this will be: numbers of new listings are volatile and finding the data for your specific area and price point would be very difficult.
What you can do is look at the demand side of the equation: for example, by monitoring how traffic on property portals fluctuates through the year. Rightmove’s traffic index shows that the number of people searching for property is relatively steady through the year until October, when it starts to decline and reaches a minimum in December. This chart shows the data for the three years prior to the pandemic (during which all bets were off when it came to the property market).
However, when you look at that minimum period in more detail, traffic really starts to pick up around New Year, and builds through the first two weeks of January (the large drop off in February 2020 was down to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic).
So what does this tell us? There are lots of people searching for property in January and February – just as many as in spring and through the summer – whereas sellers have traditionally been advised to wait until March. We believe the smarter vendor should be getting ahead of the queue and listing in January instead.
What about the worst times to sell?
While August is a busy time for completions, as people race to move in before the start of the new school year, that is not the case for viewings. Many potential buyers will be away on holiday, or too busy with children to go house-hunting.
Once school starts in September, there is often a surge of interest from buyers, although this tends to be fairly short-lived. If you are keen to sell this summer, our advice would be to make sure you are ready to list right at the beginning of September to take advantage of the rise in viewings. However, if you haven’t found a buyer by the end of October, it may be worth withdrawing from the market until after Christmas if you can, or face up to dropping your asking price.
Whenever you sell, Movewise can help you get the best results, because we don’t rely solely on estate agent viewings. We can also market directly to investors, who will be less seasonally influenced than the average home buyer. Find out more on our partner page.
