Is Spring The Best Time To Buy A House?
It's a long-held belief that spring is the best time to enter the housing market. But why? There's a lot more to it than you might expect. We take a look to see if more houses are sold in the spring and try to determine just why that is.
Nationally, the time to buy a home is spring, typically viewed as starting in March and ending in May or early June. The convenient answer is that it's simply because the weather is better, homes are unburied from beneath the snow, and it's more pleasant to house shop when it isn't below freezing. Those are certainly factors, but it doesn't explain why the boom in sales is nearly as consistent in warmer climates. The Midwest sees a larger increase in sales, but southern states still see a spike, too. On average, home sales go up by roughly 33% in non-adjusted numbers.
That's right, the seasonality of home buying is so pronounced, many companies and organizations report on housing number using numbers adjusted to account for the large spike in March, April, and May. Indeed, the Midwest is ahead of the rest of the country with the increase, with May consistently being the biggest month, while other parts of the nation, like the Northeast, usually peak in June.
So if it isn't just the weather, what is it? Well, it may be the mortgage application process. Across the country, February is the busiest time in mortgage applications, seeing as much as a 20% jump from January. That's on the heels of the two slowest months, November and December. Experts credit families preparing their taxes as the largest motivator behind this increase. It may even be influenced by the implementation of local, state, and even federal changes, such as tax credits.
Spring is the time to buy and sell, and there's statistically no place that that is more true than the Midwest. How can EXIT Northern Shores help you?
