What's the best month to sell a home in Chicago? Stop guessing.

This time of year, the #1 question I get asked is "What's the best time to list my property?" As Mary Umberger wrote in her Trib column the other day, the vague answer is: "don't wait too long".

But I prefer to use data to solve the mysteries of the housing market...

I shared some similar information last year. But now that 2009 has passed, we have the updated full-year numbers for single family homes AND condos. NOTE: These are CONTRACTS WRITTEN (not closings). I like measuring it this way, because it shows you the month in which buyers make the most decisions to purchase...

 

Not surprisingly, the SFH home market comes out a little later (on average) than the condo market. What I find interesting is that 2009's December numbers were the highest in at least 5 years! November was the highest in 3 years!

 

And these numbers are just nuts! The VERY FIRST thing that popped out at me as I was putting this together was that transactions went up every month from Jan-Jun. And Q4 of 2009 outpaced Q4 of 2008 by 81%.

Obviously, Q4 of 2008 was a disaster (stock market, election anxiety, job losses, that horrible Zack and Miri movie etc.), but it's important to note what happened in the later part of 2009's market. Could this be the bottom? We won't know until at least April of 2010. But so far - things are looking up...

Comments

[Jim]

Thanks. It might be more useful to see contracts written as a percentage of active listings. Are there not significantly more listings during the warmer months?

[Phil]

It's tough to measure the number of active listings within a given month historically. To accomplish this, you have to be tracking listings each day. I typically post listing/sales numbers every month or so. And that will give you an idea of the relationship between listings and sales.

[Jim]

So are you saying that a month with the most contracts written is the best month to sell? If the percentage of sales vs listings is higher in the busy months, then I would agree with that conclusion. But without the combined data, it would be easy to reach an inaccurate conclusion, or to reach an accurate conclusion by luck!

Consider this fictitious example:
January: 10 listings, 5 contracts = 50%
June: 20 listings, 10 contracts = 50%

Is June the better month because the contracts count is higher?

[Phil]

I'm not disagreeing. I just don't have the data for historical active listings.

One thing I *DO* have is the overall relationship between listings/sales in a given year (YTD). I posted this several times in 2009 and will be doing again in 2010.

This is truly a simple view of demand. But without the historical active listings, you can look at it this way:

Within a given year, (X) is the month in which the most buyers make a decision. If you're saying there is zero value in knowing that, I would have to disagree (emphatically).