Why It's Cheaper to Buy a House in the Winter

Joe PinskerDec 6 2014, 7:00 AM ET

 

There are still good reasons to scope out properties in the summer—but only if you're picky.

 

Hopefully, value is not the first word that comes to mind when one hears the word home. But even if it is, a house’s price is thought to be relatively stable, shifting on the scale of years, not months (barring any system-exploding market shock, of course).

What makes the housing market peculiar is that its buyers are unusually idiosyncratic—some people will fall for a house just because it has a walk-in closet, an extra bathroom, or a breakfast nook. These idiosyncrasies cause two different buyers to place wildly different values on the same house, which can produce some surprisingly rapid fluctuations in price. Over the course of a year in Dallas, for example, the annualized rate of price increases varied by an average of 12 percent between 1987 and 2012. That’s a hand-picked extreme example, but that average is between roughly five and seven percent for homes in the U.S. and the U.K. But these fluctuations, as erratic as they seem, actually occur very predictably: The cost of a home is higher in the summer than in the winter.

Read the entire article at: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/12/why-its-cheaper-to-buy-a-home-in-the-winter/383478/