If you are thinking about selling your home and have the luxury of time to wait and sell it at the perfect time, then you might be asking yourself when the best time to sell your Anthem home is. Maybe you have heard the REALTORS® talk about a “busy” season and a “slow” season and you’ve watched home prices in your neighborhood go up and down and your just not seeing the pattern. Well worry not! We are here to examine that very issue and hopefully to rest your weary mind.
Welcome to the 10th post in our “Frequently Asked Questions about Anthem” blog (and video) series.
Today’s question is: “When is the best time to sell a home in Anthem?”
This question has a tricky answer that is impacted by many factors. The most talked about factor is that Anthem, like many places in Arizona, is a destination of choice for our beloved, and much appreciated, winter visitors. These folks tend to head to Anthem, starting in the Fall and they stay with us generally until mid or late April. It is estimated that the population in Anthem goes up by about 40% during the winter months. That’s a lot!
With the population of Anthem being so significantly higher during the winter months, it is natural to see the impact of that in the real estate market. We, as REALTORS® know all too well that November and December are slow, and January brings with it a flurry of activity around Anthem. Open houses become markedly busier and REALTORS® are actively showing homes to prospective buyers. This increased activity continues through to the end of April. The question then is, does all of this activity translate into actual sales and higher prices? These are the questions that really need to be answered if we are to conclude that the busy season is the best time to put your home on the market.
It is not surprising that most REALTORs® refer to the winter season as the“busy” season and the summer season as the “slow” season when you look only at the time spent with prospective buyers and sellers, but does that extra effort translate into closed home sales? A quick check of the internet confirms this theory in a plethora of blogs and articles, so it must be true, right? Your questions made us want to dig into this issue and to “test” the common consensus.
We ran the actual numbers for Anthem only (which means we stripped away all other communities including Tramoto, New River, Desert Hills etc) and what we found were a bunch of statistics that tell a different story. The numbers suggest that the theory about “busy” winters and “slow” summers is not quite right. Here are some interesting and relevant facts about Anthem and quite possibly all of Arizona, that challenge the common logic. The 2016 and 2017 statistics show that in Anthem:
- May and June have more home sale closings than the winter months
- The average cost of a home in Anthem is higher in November than in any other month
- January, February, November and December have fewer closings than the summer months
Clearly, in Anthem, the highest number of closings correlates neither with the highest or lowest average home sale price. What’s up with that??? Are we defying the basic rules of economics?
Probably not, but it is very clear that there is more at work here than just supply and demand and more than just an influx of winter visitors impacting home sales.
It may well be that a good time to sell your Anthem home is during our busy season, January through March when housing market activity is hottest. However, with the Anthem market being sufficiently buoyant throughout the year and with the ebb and flow of average resale housing prices it is more likely, and it is our opinion that, there is no bad time to list you home if you have the right team supporting you.
What is most important is that your REALTOR® understands the market and can react to it appropriately. What you need is a real estate team that studies the numbers, knows where to find buyers, and will put its energy into targeting the people most likely to buy your home having regard to the current (we mean on a month to month basis) market conditions. We on the Wise Move AZ Team can and will do this for you, we do it for all our clients.
So that’s it for today’s post, if you want to stay up to date on all things Anthem, make sure you like our Facebook Page at ‘Wise Move AZ’ or subscribe to our Wise Move AZ channel on YouTube.
Do you have a question you would like us to answer? Have something awesome that you’d like to share about Anthem? We want to hear from you; leave us a note in the form below.
Remember, if you or anyone you know is looking to buy or sell their home, please give us a call! It’s always the right time to make a wise move with the Wise Move AZ Team.
