Selling Your Home During the Holidays Can Be a Good Idea
Conventional wisdom is not always right. Most people think that the best time to sell a home is during the spring months when the weather is mild, and most folks are not on vacation. After all, if more people are around – not vacationing or celebrating, they are more likely to be focused on the serious business of home buying. Additionally, people want to be living in their new home at the start of the new school year in the autumn, when the kids go back to school. But conventional wisdom is not always right. There are definite pluses to listing your home during the holidays. Here are some of those benefits and tips for putting your home up for sale during the holiday season.
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Benefit: During the holidays there is less competition (less homes on the market). Therefore, you will face far less competition.
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Benefit: It is logical to assume that people willing to interrupt holiday festivities, gift buying, etc. to buy a home must be pretty serious and not just casually checking out the market.
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Benefit: In many parts of the country where it gets very cold during the winter months, potential buyers tend not to go home shopping – therefore, as above, they are likely to be serious buyers who want or need to make a home purchase. Conversely, if you live in an area with milder winter weather, homebuyers would not be deterred due to the weather, but you’ll still benefit from the lack of inventory on the market.
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Benefit: If you have a hard-to-sell home with drawbacks or defects (a bad location for example), brokers who represent buyers may place your home at the bottom of the list during the busy home buying seasons. Your home will be higher on the broker’s list when there are fewer homes on the market.
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Tip: Scale back the holiday decorations. Too many decorations can be distracting. Minimizing those decorations will make the home seem more spacious. Buyers often imagine how their furniture will fit in the new home. And this becomes more difficult to do if the decorations are dominating your home.
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Tip: Don’t block or diminish important selling features such as a fireplace, dug-in bookshelves, stained-glass windows, etc. with over-the-top decorations. With this in mind, toning down the size of the tree is a good idea.
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Tip: If possible, place wrapped gifts in a closet. Again, we don’t want unnecessary distractions.
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Let’s warm things up. Place some holiday cookies on the table.
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Tip: Consider hiring a home stager to do seasonal home staging.
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Benefit: With the limited inventory on the market during the holidays, and serious buyers seeking a home, sellers can often set a higher asking price compared to times when there is much inventory on the market.
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Tip and Benefit: Often, the end of the year is when people are notified of a job transfer. Those folks will need to start looking for a new home quickly.
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Benefit: End of year tax breaks and bonuses can put more money in people’s pockets. This should serve to increase the confidence of a prospective buyer.