Dog Days of Summer For Real Estate--Maybe Not This Year? Tips for Summer Homebuyers

 What does the term "dog days of summer" mean?  The Romans coined it to refer to a period around when Sirius, the Dog Star, rose before the Sun, and was thought to bring heat, thunderstorms, and bad luck.  This year July 23rd is the exact day when Sirius is in conjunction with the Sun, with the 40 days called "dog days" running from July 3rd to August 11th.  

Traditionally, it means a time when the weather is too hot for anything to happen.  That isn't true this year for real estate, and the dog days of summer can work to a buyer's advantage:

1--Look at homes when everyone else is on vacation. There will be less competition.

2--Use the slow season to speed up the mortgage process.  Due to overlapping time off, many organizations experience slowdowns for normal timelines.  You can prevent this by dogging--pun intended--those who need to act.

3--Book inspectors, contractors, and others, who may be working, but not as frenetically as in June.

4--Take advantage of late sunsets to get appointments after work, or after the normal workdays of others.

5--Have a schedule for packing and moving that takes advantages of summer Fridays and long weekends, which might otherwise get frittered away.

6--Put shorter timeframes on contracts, so that signatures don't get delayed, and other offers don't appear.

7--Think about fall, which is right around the corner, and getting into your new home before the weather turns cold.  You will feel the heat less that way!

Use the "Off" Season

Every summer, the real estate market slows down for a period of time, but it's a different few weeks every year.  Some years, the lull is after commencements, sometimes it hits with the Fourth of July, and, if not, there's usually a slowdown in August.  If you are a buyer, and willing to search for property in the heat of summer, you can do well.

Many listings sell in the spring and close in June or July.  What's left may not even get shown very often, since vacation schedules and outdoor plans stop people from looking , and even thinking, about real estate.  That doesn't change a seller's desire to sell, however, and he/she may be more flexible as a result.  Even though there is almost always an autumn pick-up in the market, that can start after Labor Day, or after Election Day, so sellers get impatient waiting.

That's where a smart buyer comes in.  Be prepared to be accommodating on a closing date, especially with a summer-oriented property. Be ready to have vacancies, if you are looking at investment properties with school-year leases. New choices are still appearing on the hot sheets and the internet.   When the spring is late in coming, and this season it certainly was, there are often delays in getting things onto the market, and so good houses and buildings can still be available well into the dog days of summer.  In either case, they are still for sale now.

Take a beach day, and convert it into a real estate tour instead.  You will be glad that you did when fall rolls around, and you have closed already!

Weather and Real Estate

I'm looking out my window at what promises to be the first full day of rain all summer. We need it! And it's hard to object, when there's been so much sun for so long. It's a great day for people to do what they haven't gotten done through the sticky season. Procrastination is very easy in hot, humid weather.

Well, that applies to buyers and sellers of real estate as well. We've known for a long time that there is a bell curve to open houses, for example. If the weather is too nasty, people don't come. If the weather is too good, people don't come. We also know that wintery weather causes almost everyone to cancel showing appointments. The height of summer is usually very slow, with few phone calls, although vacations have a lot to do with that also.

So what's the message here? Just as when you travel, you should expect weather delays when you buy or sell real estate. But on a day like today? Grab it and get business done!

More on the Market

I just gave a press interview on the results of the first quarter in our area. Those results were dreadful. Very little sold, and what sold did so at lower prices. The activity has picked up since then, although those sales won't show up until the second quarter.

What is interesting to those of us in the business, who believe that we are bumping along the bottom, is to guess when the bump will start trending up. Units always increase before prices, and, while prices may continue to go down for a while longer, units should begin to increase. Once activity improves, pent up demand for new housing may cause houses to flood the market, as homeowners seek to trade up or down. That increase in supply will satisfy the still anemic demand for some time to come.

The lesson here is that there is a window, which has already opened in East Rock and Spring Glen, where those contrarians who seek to sell in the face of awful media reports have gotten or are getting surprising high prices. Not much was on the market, and people who needed to be in place for jobs beginning in the summer or fall, or those who needed to move for one reason or another, were competing for just a few houses. Multiple offers, many over the asking price, were common. That may change as people have more choices.

A word to the wise: He who hesitates is lost. List now.