Is there really truth to the housing market landing a screeching halt come holiday season? A team from Realtor got up to the challenge of finding out the actual movement of the market during holidays using traffic data in their website, realty.com., throughout the year 2014.
Turns out, traffic data are indeed significantly low on an actual holiday. However, they find out a surprising discovery for the days right after the day of the holiday for different parts of the country. The team used the data traffic from the website to compare activities in Thanksgiving of 2014 compared to an average day within the fourth quarter of 2014. They were also able to use the data to identify which of the states had their house hunting activities affected by the holiday and how.
In balmy Hawaii, there is only a 10% decrease on the number of people house hunting during turkey day compared to regular days for that same quarter. But in New Hampshire, the decrease has reached to up to 60%. To conclude, the slow down caused by Thanksgiving only lasts as long as the amount of time it takes to digest that mass of poultry. It's pretty much business as usual by Saturday.
So, is there really a Black Friday in the housing business, and if yes, when? Here's a shocker: December 28 turns out to be among the busiest days for real estate searches for the whole year, despite the fact that December 24 is the single slowest.
The reason: When we go past the holiday hump yet are still on a break, we feel like it's the divine time to scout for our dream home. It is believed to be the same pattern that comes with the surge of activities during New Year's Day. And perhaps, buying a house makes for a great New Year's resolution?
Family oriented holidays prove to significantly slow down home-searching activities, but beside that, there's another significant holiday that also puts people at a home-searching time-out. Can you guess? Nope, neither Mother's nor Father's Day, but... Valentine's Day. We don't need to explain why.