When is the Best Time to Sell ? – Part 1

Conventional wisdom says Spring is the best time to sell your property. We thought we should do some analysis of how accurate that belief is when it comes to the Killcare Peninsula. If we accept sales volume as a valid indicator it turns out the facts don’t support conventional wisdom, well not completely anyway.

My methodolgy was to take the median number of sales for each month over 15 years to June 2012. The suburbs included were Killcare, Killcare Heights, Hardys Bay, Pretty Beach and Wagstaffe. The results are shown in the attached chart.

Lets start with the worst month, July. This makes intuitive sense as it is the month following the end of the financial year. However we can see sales bounce back strongly in August which suggests purchase decisions are just being delayed because sales across the two months average out close to the typical level of 7-8 per month.

Activity in the Spring months continues in the 7-8 range albeit tailing off as Christmas approaches. January is quiet as we would expect but again these sales appear only to be deferred into February.

Now comes the interesting part of the year. For reasons that aren’t obvious – to me anyway – sales fall away again over March and April before another upturn in May and June.

So what do we make of all this? To me the numbers say that activity levels are actually pretty stable across the year at around 7-8 sales per month. Yes they drop off in January and July but are caught straight back up again the following month. The Spring trading period is merely right in the middle of normal activity levels. So by this measure there really is no particularly good or bad time of the year to sell your property on the Killcare Peninsula. If you have thoughts or observations we would love to hear from you via warwick.davis[at]raywhite.com or on Twitter @RWKillcare.