Best Months to purchase Homes

Every year during the holiday season centered around Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years Eve, the number of home buyers significantly decrease.  This results in homes staying on the market longer, which leads to the eventual price drops by sellers.   To add to that, families with kids who make a large pool of buyers are absent during winter months due to the schooling of their children.  This creates a perfect storm for the price drop in December.  Most homes sales closed in January have shown the best prices compared to other months.  Typically these homes go under contract in December.  Since the loan underwriting is expected to take a longer time to close than previous years under the new lending guidelines, it is possible that the closings in February take the prize for lower prices this year but the purchase contracts are still from December.

^{According to Lawrence Yun, the Chief Economist for the National Association of Realtors®  “The seasonal decline is not all price depreciation of homes” in winter, Yun notes. “A good portion of the movement is driven by a higher proportion of lower priced and smaller-sized homes getting sold during the winter months. The reason for this is that families with school-aged kids are generally not in the market during the winter because they do not want their kids to be disrupted during a school year, and it is the families with kids that generally require the larger homes that carry higher prices.”}

Read more on Yun’s article in Forbes: Best Month to Buy Homes