What Is the Best Time of Year To Sell My Home?

By Rebecca Durfey

Rebecca Durfey brings over 20 years of experience in real estate transactions within Maricopa County. Despite managing multiple clients simultaneously, her primary focus is to provide a personalized experience that makes you feel like her sole priority. Rebecca and her team are dedicated to efficiently achieving the desired outcomes for each client they serve.

As a real estate agent, one of the most common questions I get from potential home sellers is, “When is the best time of year to sell my home?” The quick answer is always that the best time to sell is when you need to move; however, if we are going to try and time the market as much as possible, the best time to sell is when you have the least amount of competition. In most markets, the lowest inventory tends to be in the fourth quarter of the year. However, in Maricopa county, even with increasing inventory in the first half of the year, it is still historically and statistically the time most contracts on homes are offered and most contracts close. Therefore, if the market stays true to the historical data, the optimal selling window is late winter months into spring. I am sharing three key points you may want to consider if you are thinking about selling:

1. Plan early. The more time you give yourself to plan out your home sale, the less stressful it should be. Getting your home ready for the market might involve more work than you anticipated, so we don’t want to procrastinate if it’s at all possible. I recommend giving yourself a three to four weeks lead time so that we have plenty of time for a pre-listing consultation, to make repairs that we anticipate will show up in an inspection, to prepare for photos by staging your furniture and décor, and to ensure we have time for questions about the listing paperwork. If you want to sell at the optimal time in our strongest market, that means we need to start as soon as possible.

2. Budget your time. In today’s market, it can take 60 to 120 days on average to sell your home once you list, but many homeowners still have the mentality leftover from the pandemic market, when homes would sell in as little as a week. That is possible, but it’s definitely not the norm in this current market. That’s why I recommend working together to plan out what is needed to hit the optimal selling window. Once you have a schedule, it will be easier to budget your time and sell when it’s best for you. I will be here the whole way to answer any questions and help prepare each step.

3. Beat the competition to the market. If you have a choice between listing earlier or later, list earlier. Once the spring market hits, supply tends to increase each month. A number of those homes could be your direct competition, and that can make it harder for you to get the best terms possible, so our goal is hit the market at a time where your home is the best option for the buyers. It’s tempting to wait for demand to pick up in hopes of prices increasing, but I would not recommend this strategy in a stubborn market that has been hard to predict, which has been the case in Maricopa county for the last two years. By the time we have your home on the market, we could be chasing a wave of demand that has already passed and prices may not have increased as much as we hoped. Instead, we will hope to get ahead of the market by listings as soon as you reasonably can.

Our first step would be to have a pre-listing meeting. Just call, text, or email me any time, and we’ll go over your situation, your goals, the current market data, and then navigate the various strategies. It’s at no cost to you and there is no obligation. I look forward to providing you my CANE client care where I will COMMUNICATE, ADVOCATE, NAVIGATE and EDUCATE through whatever market we are in because you deserve our very best. I look forward to hearing from you.

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