The New York City spring real estate market is always a frenzy with increased supply and demand. Many sellers will wait out winter to sell their home in the spring as they believe interest and action at open houses will substantially increase. I’ve been frequently asked what month in the spring is the best to sell, so I took a look at the data for an answer.
I used the number of signed contracts per month to measure demand, and active inventory on the market to measure supply. (The charts only include Manhattan data as it was inconsistent for the other boroughs.)
Surprisingly, the average number of signed contracts basically stays the same throughout these months. However, as I expected, the amount of supply does increase as we go from March and April into May
I also created a formula to answer this question: contracts signed per inventory on the market. A higher percentage below revealed a higher demand as a function of supply. Therefore, the higher the percentage, the better it was for a seller to list their apartment in that given month.
While the lower the percentage, the better it was overall for buyer power in that time period. While I made these charts to see if there was an advantage for sellers in a given month, you can see that certain years had higher percentages than others. For example, 2013 to 2015 was a better market overall for sellers. This period was a lower inventory market than 2010 to 2012. Last year showed a softer market overall and the numbers on the chart reflect more buyer power than 2013 to 2015.
Conclusion: March and April feature higher percentages overall than May and June, which show that it is slightly advantageous for a seller to list earlier rather than later in the spring season. Generally speaking, active inventory is lower in March/April than in May/June. I would recommend that a seller gets a head start on the competition by listing their apartment sometime between March 15 and April 1.