Should I SELL a Home in the Winter?

Are you looking to sell your home this winter and you're wondering if it's a good idea to sell a home in the winter? We're going to be covering all the pros and cons of selling your home during the winter, and we're getting after it right now.

You're looking to sell your home this winter and you're trying to decide if that's a good idea. We are going to be covering all the pros and cons and covering exactly what you should be thinking about if you're looking to sell during the holidays and during the winter.

Let's get after whether or not it's a good time to sell your home during the holidays.

We're going to look at a few pros and cons here.

First up, you're going to have the most motivated, serious buyers looking for your home during the holidays. We know that selling your home during the winter is difficult because you've got the holidays, you've got Thanksgiving, Christmas, the New Years, you've got friends and family rolling in.

Well, guess what? That's the same thing with buyers as well. They don't want to buy a house during the wintertime either, and when they got holidays and having to move during the holidays and go and look at homes, it's difficult for everybody involved.

But that's really the opportunity lies, is that they are serious motivated buyers for certain reasons. What are those reasons? Those reasons could be their renting and they got notice that they have to move out because maybe their landlord is selling the home or maybe their rent got dramatically increased and they're looking to buy a home instead.

They got to move in a certain timeframe. Maybe it's a tax implication. Maybe they're in a 1031 exchange and they're having to identify a home or a property that they're going to buy and close them that within 180 days, but you only have 90 days to identify that property and then 180 to close on it.

They're under a time constraint to get that home identified and then ultimately close the deal. It could be a tax consideration, it could be that they have a job relocation, maybe they're getting relocated here and maybe the company is giving them financial incentive to purchase a home instead of renting. Helping them with closing costs, helping them with relocation costs to get out here and they're looking to purchase a homes.

There could be a myriad of reasons why a buyer is serious about buying during the winter. That's where the opportunity lies, is that you have a serious motivated set of buyer pool that are looking to purchase your home. You're not going to have tons of buyers coming to your home during the holidays like you might have during the spring and summer. That's nice because you're having fewer buyers having to come through and disturb you during your holidays, but they are going to be more motivated.

The other factor is that you're going to have less competition of homes available on the market during the winter time as opposed to spring and summer. Spring and summer are the biggest home buying and selling timeframes and you're going to have a lot more competition.

You're going to have, yes, more buyers coming in the market to potentially buy your home, but you're going to have a lot more homes on the market as well that you're now having to compete against for those buyers. You got to really spruce up your home to make it really, really shine to compare to those other homes because they might get to your home and go, "I like your home, but I like this other home a little bit better". And they go to that one first.

Then maybe they come back around so it might take longer to sell your home potentially during the spring, summer with that extra competition so you have less competition and so you can potentially not have to do everything possible to sell your home.

That being said, there are some disadvantages to having less competition and fewer buyer pool is that the buyers know also that "hey, maybe they can get a deal during the winter" so you might not get as high of a price during the wintertime as in the spring or summer. And we see historically that home prices do dip in the wintertime and then they come back up in the spring and summer.

You might have to do certain things to help the buyer close the deal. That might be things like covering closing costs in order for them to actually purchase your home.

So you'd be prepared, but there might be some costs out of pocket for you that come from the proceeds of the sale of your home to help cover costs for the buyer to get them to close a deal.

Those are the pros and cons. There's definitely motivated set of buyer pool, less competition of other homes, but you might have to come up with some costs, closing costs to cover the buyer and you may not get as high of a price for that home as you might get in the spring and summer.

Curtis Chism, Realtor
858-281-2568 | Mobile
info@sandiegohomes.io
Chism Team | DRE #02105113
brokered by eXp Realty | DRE #01878277