Villa de Como, a Longboat Key home for sale.
Each year, Southwest Florida’s busiest quarter for tourism takes place between January and March as sun-starved northerners make their annual pilgrimage here to escape plunging temperatures and frozen precipitation too often measured in feet. Knowing that so many visitors are here, many would-be home sellers automatically assume that the same period yields the year’s highest concentration of home buyers. In fact, it does not. We point this out because too often we hear prospective sellers profess plans to list their homes late in the year in order to have them primed, priced and ready to sell by January 1, the unofficial start of the region’s high tourist season. Their presumption, of course, is that more feet on the ground equates to more buyers in the market; which sounds plausible, except that annual sales results don’t support it. The honor for the top-producing sales period actually belongs to the quarter ending in June; followed by July, August and September. In fact, Southwest Florida is really no different from the rest of the U.S., where spring and summer account for the lion’s share of all annual property transactions. For people on a mission to buy, spring produces better travel weather, more hours of daylight to explore neighborhoods, and the urgency to buy before school, work and social calendars begin to fill up again. Last year our region enjoyed the highest annual level of property sales in its history, but was left with a chronic shortage of properties to sell. 55% of those properties sold between April and September, with the remainder selling between October and March. Of course, one year of activity does not make a trend; but this has been our seasonal pattern for many years. Additionally, the summer months are when we typically welcome our annual contingent of international buyers who use their extended vacations to visit our region and scour for properties. It is also when local homeowners are apt to make their move. With all this in mind, sellers who want their properties on the market in time for the region’s most active home selling season should list now and have their “For Sale” signs installed as soon as possible. Home sales throughout our region peak between April and July. Your selling strategy should also include making very sure the property shows as well online as it does from curbside, as the internet is where nine out of ten buyers begin collecting information about communities, neighborhoods, lifestyles, properties, etc. We are proud to report that Michaelsaunders.com was recently voted the best web site in real estate by a panel that included 70 chief marketing and technology officers from within the top rungs of the real estate industry; as well as technology pros from outside the business. In addition to its uncluttered look, speedy results and easy intuitive navigation, two other features helped the site win out over 749 other submissions. First, the site has proven itself to be a hit with users. In just the year since it was introduced, the number of visitors to MichaelSaunders.com jumped 45 percent; while page views rose by 38 percent. Secondly, the site allows visitors who might not be familiar with our Gulf Coast communities to explore them online through extensive galleries of neighborhood, property and lifestyle photos (and videos), as well as through descriptive word profiles. They can then match specific properties with their preferred lifestyle, neighborhood, price and other search parameters. Talk to an agent from Michael Saunders & Company. You may be pleasantly surprised at what your property can sell for in a market where low inventories mean that each new listing—when priced competitively and prepared for the market—is met with significant buyer attention; and often draws competing offers.
