Why it’s a smart move to list your home on Memorial Day Weekend
Warm weather and a three-day weekend makes this a perfect time for house hunters.
Memorial Day Weekend is the busiest summer holiday for real-estate activity, a recent study from real-estate company HomeLight found .
The best time for sellers to list their properties is early May or April, research suggests , but there are advantages to putting a home on the market this weekend. While this is a popular weekend to travel, school is still in session so many people are still waiting to go on their summer vacations.
“A lot of home buyers are hitting open houses instead of the beach,” said Holden Lewis, housing expert at personal-finance website NerdWallet.
Last year, 142,000 listings came onto the market in the week leading up to Memorial Day weekend, according to data from Realtor.com , making it the third-busiest week of the year for new listings. The busiest week last year occurred two weeks before Memorial Day weekend, with 148,000 listings.
Meanwhile, the week following Memorial Day weekend is only the 16th busiest of the year, we 129,000 new listings.
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(Realtor.com is operated by News Corp NWSA, +3.32% subsidiary Move Inc., and MarketWatch is a unit of Dow Jones, which is also a subsidiary of News Corp.)
On average, a home will be seen three times on the first day the property is listed, said Skylar Olsen, director of economic research at Zillow ZG, -0.51% . Therefore, it’s clear that many sellers take advantage of the extra eyeballs their property can receive during the holiday weekend.
This weekend is also ideal for completing a home sale. Last year, 15,564 homes were sold or closed on during Memorial Day, higher than the Fourth of July (8.504) and Labor Day (11,520). Only 10,545 sales occurred on the Monday after Memorial Day Weekend.
This is all the more unusual because closings typically happen during business hours, said Danielle Hale, chief economist at Realtor.com . “They can close before they go on summer vacation and take care of the move before they settle for school,” she said.