Selling a House in Winter

No one wants to move their Christmas Tree is the old real estate axiom. Cold Temperatures, Snowy Weather, Holiday Madness and good old seasonal slowing all combine to make the idea of selling a home during the winter months downright scary. The truth is that although winter selling won’t bring the volume of potential home buyers to your door, it might just bring a better one. When winter hits and the real estate market slows, only the most serious buyers are looking. It’s the summer months that bring out the Looky-Loos. These are the people that decide to go look at houses in order to see if they are motivated to move. This is actually quite easy during the summer months because there's so much inventory on the market. Winter buyers, on the other hand, are almost always very serious.

Winter buyers are generally people who went through a job transfer or other unexpected event. They show up needing to find a place to live. renting isn't really an option for two reasons first of all most lease terms are one year. getting into a rental puts them back in the buying Market at the same time that you're later. If on the other hand, they decide to break their lease they can end up paying thousands of dollars in penalties to their landlord. So, they tend to jump into the market with a strong conviction.

Another unexpected benefit of selling during the winter months is that there's very little competition. Most home sellers will walk through the steps to selling a home and do their preparation during the winter months. The idea is to hit the market at the peak and get as many potential buyers through the home is possible. In many instances, this scenario can work well for home sellers. If they are in a hot seller's market the strategy just might yield multiple offers and a bidding war.

Counting on this is not advised. There are countless stories of buyers exercising inspection and financing contingencies to get out of contract. Since there's so much inventory on the market the buyer finds a house they like more, so the buyers decide to get out of the first deal and move on to the next. Selling in the winter doesn't guarantee this won't happen but the decreased amount of inventory makes it much less likely.

Another unexpected benefit of selling during the winter months is that title companies, lenders and Realtors are not crazy busy. This means all of the ancillary Services involved with getting your transaction closed have more bandwidth to focus on your deal. This means all parties have the ability to be more accommodating to schedule changes, loan approvals, Etc…

So, if you have to sell your home during the winter months it's certainly not the end of the world. For a complete list of the "Benefits of Selling a Home in the Winter" time take a look at this article.