The Best Time To Put a House on the Market This Spring

The best time of year to buy a house is usually the fall to early winter. Sellers often take homes off the market from Thanksgiving to the end of the year, and homeowners who keep their properties on the market during that time are typically motivated to sell. On the other hand, the best time to sell a house is springtime.

While home inventories tend to increase as winter moves into spring, so does the number of potential homebuyers, and that is when housing market conditions tend to generally have the ideal balance that favors home sellers, particularly relatively fewer sellers and more buyers, according to real estate listing website Realtor.com. The exact best week differs among the 50 largest housing markets but is generally between March and May.

To determine the best time to put a house on the market this spring, 24/7 Wall St. reviewed data from Realtor.com’s report, The Best Time to Sell: The Week of April 16-22. Realtor.com based its findings on comparisons of historical listing prices each week from 2018-2019 and 2021-2022 to a benchmark from the first full week of the year. All data came from Realtor.com. The 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas are ordered alphabetically.

Nationwide, the week of April 16-22  is the best time to sell, with homes reaching 12.1% higher prices than the start of the year and selling 13 days faster than the year’s average. (Also see, cities where home values went up the most since 2000.)

Among the 50 markets listed, the earliest time to make a little extra on selling a home is the week of Feb. 12 in the San Jose metropolitan area of northern California, which includes adjacent Sunnyvale and Santa Clara. During that week, houses in the metro area typically list at an estimated 6.5% higher price compared to the start of the year and stay on the market for an average of 14 fewer days compared to the average week.  

By comparison, prospective home sellers in the Memphis metropolitan area, which overlaps into Mississippi and Arkansas, would be better off waiting until the second week of May to list their home. In that week, they could sell their home at a premium of 11.4% compared to the start of the year, and typically sell 10 days faster compared to the average week. (These are the cities where people need the smallest downpayments to buy their home.)

The best time of year to put a home up for sale in 22 of these top 50 markets is in the latter half of April, in the days after tax deadline season ends. In 17 markets, listing a home at the right time can, on average, get the seller at least 10% above the price at the start of the year, led by a 24% premium for homes listed in the last week of April in the Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis metropolitan area of Wisconsin.

Here is the best time to put a home on the market this spring.

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