Selling your home during a holiday period
An interesting article has appeared in the local newspaper about the difficulties of trying to sell a house during holiday periods, in particular Christmas and Thanksgiving. Although it is now the beginning of the year, I thought it was still an interesting subject to try to broach as holiday periods naturally occur all throughout the year. For example, Easter is almost upon us.
As a general rule (and most real estate professionals agree with this), selling your home during a holiday period can be extremely tricky. Most people who are out to buy a property generally don’t have the time or the inclination to browse open houses during a holiday. Instead they will have family events to go to, dinners to prepare and so on.
But the same could also be said for sellers. Who wants a buyer coming around to look at the house when you have a private family event going on? So even sellers may not be so inclined to have an open house during say Thanksgiving.
But if the buyer and seller ARE so inclined to consider a bit of house-selling during a holiday period, many realtors agree that there are some things that you should bear in mind.
First, you should make sure the house in question is not too cluttered. It’s easy during a family event for rooms to get messy and this can have an adverse effect on the prospective buyer who may not see the advantages of the house because they are too busy tripping over the kid’s toys.
Second, you should make sure that your realtor is available during the holiday period! You never know, I may be away on vacation when you need me to schedule a house-viewing.
Thirdly, and this is very important, make sure that any promotional photos you take of your property doesn’t show any seasonal decorations. If you take pictures of your house in December complete with tree and decorations, having those same pictures circulating in June creates a bad impression. It reminds prospective buyers that your house has been on the market for quite a while and may therefore be unsellable.
With a little bit of preparation and thought, you can even sell your property during the holidays.
