Every agent has their own idea of when and how to market new homes for sale. So answers obviously may differ, but I am often asked: “What days of the week do most properties get listed for sale?” Here’s the answer and more importantly, why:
Answer: Wednesday, Thursday and lately Friday
Here’s why:
1. Broker’s Open: Every Tuesday, there’s a slew of open houses for real estate agents to preview houses coming on the market that week. Usually agents will do the broker’s open before they list the property in the MLS. Sometimes it’s to get feedback on pricing, sometimes it’s just to showcase the house to prospective agents. Either way, if they’re doing one it won’t actually be listed until after this.
2. The Internet: most properties will do an open house on Sunday of the week the property is listed. For marketing purposes, when we put the listing in our local MLS, it takes 48 hours for the information to propagate to the other sites, such as Washington Post, Trulia, Zillow, etc etc. There’s hundreds of sites, and they pull from new data entry. In order to make sure the information is widespread, you want to make sure it gets on the market before the weekend when people start searching for new listings.
3. Most buyers tour homes on the weekends, keeping a list of places that come on during the week. You will notice very, very few homes that are listed on a Saturday or Sunday. That’s because most people will already have their list together of places they want to see. Then they debrief on Sunday and/or Monday after they’ve had some time to consider what they’ve seen.
4. Monday’s are catch-up days. You’ll rarely see a slew of new properties on Mondays because most people are catching up with the weekend work. Either following up with agents who showed the house over the weekend, or going over any offers they got over the weekend from buyers. You will see Mondays are highly active for properties going under contract.