What Is the Best Day of the Week to View New Home Listings?
Warm weather means a lot: pool days, ice cream trucks and peak travel season. About 80% of all moves in the US occur between April and September. The bad news (unless you’re a landlord or seller): The current seller’s market means home prices are likely to remain ridiculously high until the summer.
As if the prices weren’t bad enough, anyone looking for a new home knows how fast the listing turnaround can be. I’m currently looking for an apartment in NYC and I know full well how painful it is to see my dream ad posted in the morning and caught by someone (presumably richer and faster than me) within a few hours. How to make finding an apartment less painful?
You may not be able to control the time of year you need to move in, but you can control when you search for specific listings. If you want to optimize your apartment search, you need to know which day of the week you should look for new listings.
When to look for new listings of houses and apartments
To determine the best time to look for new listings as a buyer, I researched when sellers are encouraged to post their listings. General opinion: Thursday is ad search day.
This is because sites like Zillow advise landlords that Thursday is the best day to post a listing because most tenants want to see rental properties as soon as possible, and most of them have more vacancies over the weekend.
Numerous interviews with real estate agents at Apartment Therapy confirm this wisdom. Real estate broker Kimberly Jay , for example, points out that new listings tend to hit the market just before the weekend, meaning it’s safe to say a lot of listings will drop on Fridays as well. If you’re looking to buy rather than rent, often a weekend open house will be your only chance to see a property before the seller starts looking at offers.
When it comes to the best times of the day to view deals, Apartment Guide recommends that buyers strategize around a typical business day: Let’s say property managers and agents start posting new listings at the start of their day, around 9:00 and 10:00 .
Seller’s Market Means Fast Turnovers
The fast turns in the competitive market mean that your new home search can feel very chaotic. We just can’t imagine that sites like Zillow or StreetEasy will publish only the best and latest listings at 9am every Thursday.
On the positive side here, a lot of dream lists can (and do) come out at any time of the day as well. Instead of torturing yourself by hitting “update” over and over again, consider investing in a real estate agent who can devote their time to finding the best deals as soon as they come up. Here’s what else to know about buying property from a seller’s market .