Now that Halloween is in our rearview mirror and Thanksgiving is squarely in our sites, we are officially into the holiday season! The days are steadily getting shorter, and daylight savings time will conclude after this weekend. This Monday, home buyers planning on house hunting after work will need flashlights. If this holiday season is anything like the last one, they’ll be lots of active buyers in the market.
That being said, there has never been a year in real estate like 2020 when the market didn’t pause or even slow during the holidays. It plowed straight through the season and into the winter of 2021, doing its best imitation of a springtime market throughout, only with less inventory and more potential buyers. So, what can we expect this holiday season?
From my current experience with several active listings on the market and several more properties with accepted offers, I don’t think this season will cool down as much as it usually does. Open houses are getting good traffic. I was just in one multiple offer situation, and I hope to be in another soon. As long as a property is priced right and presented well, buyers are coming forward. I don’t see the overbidding getting too crazy, which makes this a good time to buy, especially with interest rates still remaining low.
We are no longer seeing 20-40 private showings during the first week on the market. That was a COVID thing. During the worst of the COVID pandemic, showing by appointment only was a great way to go. Buyers didn’t want to come to crowded open houses for obvious reasons. In November of 2021, are people are planning to visit Sunday open houses, instead of coming out during the week.
Those 20-40 private showings have become 20-40 people visiting open houses on the first weekend. Of course, some of those people are neighbors. No open house would be the same without a few neighbors. But there are real buyers out there. Most of them just aren’t going super crazy when they write offers, which is a good thing. When buyers are getting blown out of the water by other buyers, they tend to lose hope and put their home ownership dreams on hold, or they look at alternative areas to buy.
Two desirable home attributes that are holdovers from the pandemic are pools and fourth bedrooms. People still want pools, more so than ever before. Public pools are nice, but nothing beats having one in your own backyard when you are swimming in it, or even just laying beside it. They are great for entertaining, and maintaining social distances outdoors too. Pools used to be a plus and a minus that would eliminate a certain percentage of buyers. There may still be some home buyers who won’t buy a house with a pool, but pools have certainly become more sought after.
My experience is that fourth bedrooms have also become huge. This is because so many people are working from home now, at least part time, if not full time. They need that space for home offices. As the workforce has shifted homeward, I pity the owners of commercial office space. The leasing market is in the tubes. While it’s true many people are going back to the office, they still need places to work at home too.
If you are a home buyer this holiday season, the coming winter is likely going to be a good opportunity to find your next home. If that home has a pool and a fourth bedroom, you can expect to see some pretty fierce competition. Otherwise, buying a home is going to be much more attainable than it has been in the past 18 months.