We'll tell you the best month to buy a house, and we've got the data to back it up.
If you're thinking about buying a home this year, you might be wondering if there is a better month to buy. When are sellers more likely to negotiate price? When will you have the most options for homes?
In this article, we look at four data points that give you some insight into the best months to buy a home in the Raleigh area.
Find out which month homes sold for the lowest percentage of the sales price. Find out which month had the most inventory to choose from. Find out which month had the fewest view visits per listing. And find out which month had the fewest competing offers.
After we show you all of this, we’ll look at all the data together to find the best month to buy a home in Raleigh by finding the month with the most inventory to choose from and the least competition.
We crunched all the numbers and found the month with the most homes for sale and the least competition in Raleigh, NC.
data
#1. Sale price to list price ratio
Many people believe that the month with the lowest sales prices is the best month to buy a home.
And on the surface, it makes sense that it would feel that way.
You can see that the biggest discounts were on properties that closed in January, February, March, and December. But there's a big reason why these aren't necessarily the best months to buy, and we'll explain why in a moment.
#2. New Stock
The number of homes on the market can have a big impact on how easily you can negotiate price.
If there are 20 houses in your desired price range and location, your offer will likely be lower than if you only had two options.
We see that the highest number of properties come on the market between March and October.
But don't get too hung up on this metric either, because inventory only matters in relation to the number of people shopping for it. Let's move on to the next metric: impressions per listing.
#3. Number of properties listed
The number of people searching for homes for sale typically peaks in March and April.
It then slowly declines until autumn, when it drops dramatically.
Fewer viewings means less competition, but you'll be giving up a few things if you buy during that time. Don't worry, we'll explain the trade-offs below.
#4. Competing offers
Now, as I said, more inventory means fewer competing offers.
However, looking at this graph, this doesn't really seem to be the case.
The months with the most inventory also seem to have the most competing offers.
There's a reason for this, which we'll explain shortly: you can't just look at a single metric – you need to look at how these data points interact with each other.
Because there really is a secret month where all the data points come together to create the best possible environment for you to get a great deal on a really nice home.
Now let's calculate these numbers and figure out which month it is.
The lowest selling price isn't always what it seems
If you're looking for the absolute lowest sale price, you should look at the month with the lowest list price to sale price ratio.
It's a number between 0 and 100 that indicates how much of a discount the home was offered at off the list price it sold for.
For example, the month with the lowest sales price to list price ratio in 2023 was January, with sales price at 96.6%.
This means that the average home listed on the MLS sold for 3.4% below list price.
But before you make plans to buy property during this period, there's something you should know about properties sold in January, or any other month with the biggest price cuts. And to find out, I had to dig a little deeper than the numbers.
What types of homes qualify for the discount?
Properties sold in the month with the lowest sales price to list price ratio used the word “investor” 31% more often in agent comments than properties sold in the month with the highest sales price to list price ratio.
So what kind of homes are being advertised as investor homes?
This home was sold in January 2023.
The home was listed for $329,000 but sold for $280,000, a 15% discount.
An investor purchased the property, renovated it and resold it six months later for $435,000, 100% of the list price.
It was a great house and a bargain. If you're a contractor. Or if you're just good at renovating. But sales like this really affect the overall sale price to list price ratio during the winter months, making it seem like a good time to grab a bargain.
However, if you are looking for a property that is ready to move in, winter is not the best time to buy.
In fact, not many sellers plan to put their home on the market in the winter – usually, when they do, it’s because they need to sell and haven’t spent the time preparing their home for the market.
There really aren't that many great move-in ready homes out there, but they do pop up every now and then during the winter. This home sold for 1% above list price in Raleigh's Lakemont neighborhood. This just goes to show that if a home is really good, well-maintained, nicely staged, and move-in ready, it won't sell at a discount just because it's winter.
Winter is the best time for shopping
If the selling price is the most important criterion for you and the condition of the home isn’t as important…maybe you’re an investor or you just love doing your own renovations and adding your own personality to homes, winter might be the perfect time to put an offer on a house to find a really good deal on a remodeled property.
The months with the highest discounts were November, December, January and February, with contracts awarded in December, January, February and March.
While it may seem like it on the surface, finding the month with the cheapest prices isn't the best metric for finding the best month to buy. So let's look at the months with the most inventory.
Why are costs higher in months with high inventory?
Now, if you're looking for a home that you can move into immediately, you'll want to look at the month that sellers actually start listing their homes on the market.
I'm looking for a month with a lot of stock.
In 2023, the month with the most inventory was June. March, May, and August weren't too bad either.
The downside to buying in the month when you have the most options is that multiple offers may be at their highest during this period.
May and June had the most competing offers in 2023. It's true that more inventory means less competition, but there must be enough supply to meet the demand of the current buyer demographic before multiple offers disappear.
And in areas like Morrisville and Cary, where land for building homes is very limited, there will likely always be competition in the market.
However, when we look at the supply months across the Triangle, we see that the spring months have the lowest inventory levels relative to buyer purchases.
The spring of 2023 was the biggest seller's market.
So with the current shortage situation, spring probably isn't the best month to buy.
If you're in a strong buyers' market, like after the housing bubble burst in 2008, spring is arguably the best time to shop, when inventory is at its highest. At the peak of the bubble burst in 2011, March, April and May saw the highest rate of listings to buyers throughout the year.
If you want to know the best month to buy a home in a housing shortage environment, it's not spring. Let's get to the numbers and inventory.
Number of showings and availability
To find the best month to buy, we look for the sweet spot when viewing numbers are down but the number of listings is still quite high.
So let's look at the number of viewings per property per month, along with a few other things:
This is where you start looking at your data as a whole rather than individual parts, and you'll start to see some great opportunities to enter the market.
Multiple Offers
Looking at multiple offers: Offers made in September, October, November, and December had the lowest percentage of multiple offers.
Now, this is a bit spine-chilling to me, because I would have expected the months with the fewest multiple bids to coincide with the months with the lowest sale prices. But there is an outlier here. (Is this the right chart?)
October did not appear in the lowest price group.
So October can be a month where homes on the market are nicely displayed and there aren't as many people bidding on homes that are for sale.
And this became a reality because when we looked for real estate agent comments about investors, we found that there were 39% fewer properties available for investors compared to the winter months, when the ratio of asking price to listing price was very low.
Additionally, listing data presentation was very positive in October compared to the spring.
In the spring, when the sales price ratio was highest, there were about 7.9 viewings per property, whereas in October, there was an average of about 5 viewings per property.
While this represents a 35% drop in listings, the number of properties on the market in October was only 7% below the average for the spring months, when prices were at their highest.
This means there is some inventory to choose from, fewer buyers looking, and fewer people making offers, making October a great month to buy a home.
If you liked this article, you might also be interested in this in-depth analysis of Raleigh's housing market throughout 2023.
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