I was contacted by someone looking to sell on the Isle Of Palms
Note : I will talk about real life examples throughout the blog, but for the sake of confidentiality, I have to keep names, addresses and certain information restricted so the people can’t be identified.
So Sam Seller called me and asked me to come take a look at his IOP house and discuss possibly listing it for sale for him. He had a short window in which to sell it so listing it at the optimal time was critical.
IOP is a beach island so it’s a very seasonal market, so before I went to meet him, I analyzed which month houses sold in, which month the houses were listed in an attempt to find a correlation and minimize time on the market.
First off, I took a look at data from 2018 on IOP, using similar sized & priced houses to his, to see which months had the highest number of sales.
You can see that the four months from May to August have 55% of the year’s sales in just 33% of the year. Not a surprise, this is a Summer vacation island and more people are visiting then.
Now, bear in mind, that these dates are the actual closing date, so we can figure that they went under contract 30-60 days before, so the buyers are out looking and ready to sign contracts from mid February onwards and they keep buying until July. Once August comes, sales drop off dramatically, everyone has had their fill of the beach and it quietens down a lot in the Fall.
Next I looked at which months are the most popular for Isle of Palms sellers to put their houses up for sale
You can see that March and May are by far the busiest months for listing houses on Isle of Palms.
But when you look at the data in the first graph, you can see those listings in May are definitely too late in the buying season. If you list in May and we’ve already seen that by August, the buyers are gone, those sellers are only giving themselves 60 days to find a buyer. Those guys are either going to be accepting low offers to get rid of the house before the end of the season or they’re going to be sitting on the market until the next season comes around.
Sam Seller was thinking a mid March list date would be good for his house, but I made the argument that 30% of the listings for the entire year get listed in March and every new listing is a competitor. As with everything in life, if everyone else is doing it, they’re usually wrong, so let’s see when really is the best time to put a beach house up for sale.
If we look at all those closings in May, those buyers are signing their contracts in March or April and they’re not buying a house on their first weekend out, people usually go out and look 3 or 4 weekend before they actually buy, especially on the more expensive beach houses. That means they started look in February, but they were bored in February because there was nothing new to look at, with only one new listing, so if Sam Seller lists in February, then he’s a huge step ahead of all those other guys who are listing in March.
So do you want to list and get all the attention or wait until every other house is also coming up for sale ?