Published: 03/12/2019
When do you think the best day of the year is to put your property on the market? The first day of Spring? Just after Easter? Or perhaps when the schools have returned from the summer holidays?All are good choices and show that you’re thinking about when you’ll have a bigger audience. But do you know when you’ll have the biggest audience of all?
Boxing Day.
That’s right. Britain’s new Christmas tradition after the turkey is gone, the presents are opened and the wrapping chucked out, is to slump on the couch, pull out the phone and dive into property websites such as OnTheMarket.com and Rightmove.co.uk.
Perhaps it’s not surprising. Property is definitely an English thing – an Englishman’s home is castle and all that – but sitting through countless more repeats of The Wizard of Oz, The Great Escape and Star Wars Episode 1 to 76 just doesn’t hold the appeal it once did. And neither does being held captive to another game of Twister. Now we have a greater escape.
Historically speaking, the new year season for selling your home has always been around the second week of January: the school term is underway; people have returned form winter holidays; the regularity of working life has become the norm once more.
But things have changed. No longer do people need to even come home from holiday to being their search for property, with palm-fringed beaches in Thailand and The Maldives proving just as accessible for WiFi as anywhere at home (and often better – come on BT!) This means that people are now starting their search BETWEEN Christmas and New Year, bringing the January upturn in interest forward by about three weeks. In 2018, visits to Rightmove on Boxing Day exceeded 25million. With an average day on Rightmove getting just 4.5million visits, this change of behaviour is obviously something we shouldn’t ignore.
But don’t worry: having your property available on Rightmove on Boxing Day doesn’t mean you have to accept viewings over the Christmas period. If you’d rather have some downtime with the family or by yourself, that’s absolutely fine. But it doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the increased audience and generate interest for viewings in the new year.
Many people searching and enquiring will still be out of the country, or in the UK but in the same mindset as you, and either not able or keen to actively go out and view. Yet they do at least want to begin a conversation while they have plenty of time: it certainly beats the usual grabbing of moments at work or squeezing in searches on the train home or in an evening after work.
All of these things make this new trend entirely understandable given the pressures of daily work life, family routines and other commitments, which are all, to a lesser or greater extent, removed for a few days over Christmas. And with technology not only filling a void but making more things possible, people look to act on the things they’re already thinking about.
Given all that we’ve covered so far, our advice is no longer to wait until January to market your property if you are thinking of moving in the new year. Instead, we strongly recommend that you take advantage of the Boxing Day surge. There are simply too many people actively looking for their new home to ignore them.
We can prepare sales particulars, have photos taken, floor plans drawn up and get you listed on the web in time for Boxing Day, and work with you over viewings to whatever schedule you like. You do not have to accept any viewings this year, either in the run up to Christmas or between Christmas and New Year; but it’s important to take full advantage of a once-a-year opportunity to put your home in front of as many people as possible.
If you would like us to help you seize the initiative, please get in touch with one our teams:
Berkhamsted office: 01442 863000
Tring office: 01442 820420