A very natural question for home sellers or buyers is: When is the best time of year to sell a home? The internet will sometimes tell you the answer is Summer. That's because Summer is best in some parts of the country where it's pretty challenging to go outside for months at a time. A lot of advice, including chatbot advice, will settle on Spring. But then, how do you define Spring? Here in Manhattan Beach, our "Spring Selling Season" really begins in February and early March, well before "calendar Spring" begins on March 21. We have observed, both by watching the market and participating in it with buyers and sellers, that the Manhattan Beach market really has two notable selling seasons: Spring (which starts early) and Fall, roughly between Labor Day and early November. But if you know this blog at all, you know we're not going to leave this with a 100-word summary of our observations. We need graphs and charts This chart compiles our hand-crafted data on pending sales from the past 11 years (2014-2024). The busiest months for pending sales are those above the zero line, and the slowest months dip below. For each year, we totaled up the number of pending sales for the year, and divided by 12 for a monthly average. Then we looked at each individual month's performance, measuring the number of pendings for that month against that year's monthly average. What you see here mostly fits the pattern we described above in words. The Spring months, starting with March, consistently see substantially more-than-average pending sales. That means those months are busiest. The pattern trends downward and closer to average by July, with August often below average and September providing a mixed bag - generally up from August, however. October stands out as a bright spot in the Fall, before pending sales trail off notably for November/December and into January/February of the next year. (We've labeled September/October as the "Fall Burst." Your terminology may differ.) We didn't label any of the individual years represented by the blue lines here, because the point was to look at what's a typical trend, regardless of year. However, we did put one year in light blue, the one that stands out for varying quite a bit from the seasonality of other years. That was 2020, COVID-19's "year without a Spring" (market), before the real estate world opened up and went bananas. As to the big picture, we see similar, but maybe more mixed, patterns with closed sales as to what we saw with the pendings. Here, the first two months of the year are further below average, and March just about reaches the monthly average for closed sales. This makes intuitive sense - closings in January and February would mostly reflect purchases inked in December and January, two months where inventory is lowest and buyers are usually focused on other things. Springtime closings are concentrated in April through July, but don't really drop off as much as one might expect in August. (Insert your own hypothesis here, maybe about people wanting to close in time for school to start in August?) September and October are mixed bags, sometimes above trend and sometimes below. Meantime, closings notably drop below average in November and December. We were intrigued to see how this data on closed sales do not portray as much seasonality as the pending-sales data, which capture real-time market activity better. If you only had these numbers to go by, you might conclude only that November-February are slow. Duh. Now, just in case all of those different lines were jarring or hard to follow, we've smoothed out the data from both charts above with one more display. Here we've averaged out the data from all 11 years and created one line (green) for pending sales, and one for closed sales (blue). Not only is this chart less noisy, it is also less suggestive as to there being any kind of "Fall Burst." September and October are only 1 and 7, respectively, above average for pending sales, although that comes after more lackluster Summer months, so it's definitely an increase. For giggles, we ran the same chart without 2020 data. That year was such an anomaly, due to having the market shut down for 2 months, we thought this chart might better represent typical trends. (Its title is like a freaking academic citation, however - sorry.) Truthfully, this chart didn't change much, besides showing both August and September about 5 under average for pending sales, making the jump in October (+8 over average) somewhat more notable. Note that September, October and November are all showing closed sales right about at average for a month in any given year. We also considered the steep difference between December closings (15 below average) and January's (37 below average). That last point suggested to us that a number of buyers might rush to get their closings in before year-end. Thanks for geeking out with us. Can we just put in a quick plug? Our pending-sales data are compiled by hand, twice per month, and published in MBC's twice-monthly MB Market Updates. The spreadsheets that form the basis for these data are published and archived, going back years. The very first market-update data spreadsheets were published here way-way-way-back-when in 2007. We've learned that data published by the MLS on pending sales are not as accurate as our own data, because the MLS numbers fail to account for almost half the pending sales, which are coded as "active under contract" (formerly "contingent" status) instead of "pending." Therefore, you can only get some of the most important data in this post directly from MBC - hand-crafted, hand-compiled, no MLS, no A.I. And to think, this website is free Well, it's free in part because our readers regularly call when they do have a need in local real estate, buying or selling. We encourage that behavior, and we're thankful every time
