First impressions count
“Since you only get one chance to make a first impression with your listing,” said Tim Ellis, Product Manager for Statistics and Trends at Redfin, “we decided to dig into our data to find out whether putting your home on the market on a certain day of the week is correlated with sales success.”
After analyzing over one million listings nation wide, the real estate brokerage came to the conclusion that homes listed on Sunday get “marginally more” online views while homes listed on Friday (hence are fresh on the market when consumers are about to start their weekend tours) are toured 19 percent more.
Redfin’s numbers also reflect that homes listed on Thursday or Friday sell for slightly closer to the original list price and again noted Friday as a superior day to list, claiming they are 12 percent more likely to sell within 90 days.
In a down market, home sellers are desperate for their real estate agent to get the listing just right and to use every competitive advantage at their disposal. Is the day a listing is input into the MLS indicative of its success? Redfin thinks so.
Redfin’s Methodology:
“We analyzed 1,209,010 listings that came on the market between January 1, 2010 and September 1, 2011 in Washington DC, Arlington County, Baltimore City, Queens NY, Fulton County (Atlanta), Cook County (Chicago), Travis County (Austin), Maricopa County (Phoenix), Clark County (Las Vegas), San Diego County, Los Angeles County, Orange County (Irvine), San Francisco County, San Mateo County, Sacramento County, Multnomah County (Portland), and King County (Seattle). We broke down the data on eventual sale statistics, tours by Redfin agents, and views on Redfin.com.For listing views, we calculated the average number of views each listing received on Redfin.com, then calculated the average number of views for each day of the week listings came on the market. The chart shows the deviation of each day’s individual average listing views count from the overall average listing views count.
For tours, we divided the total number of tours Redfin agents took customers on in the study regions during the time period by the total number of listings that came on the market in those regions to get the average number of tours per listing. We then calculated the tours per listing for homes listed on each weekday. The chart shows the deviation of each day’s average tours per listing from the overall average.
For prices, we calculated the sale-to-original-list-price ratios of homes listed on each weekday that sold during the study period. For example, a home listed at $500,000 that sold for $472,000 would have a 94.4% ratio (Thursday and Friday’s average). If that same home sold for $469,500, it would have a 93.9% ratio (Sunday and Monday’s average). The chart shows each day’s average sale price to original list price ratio.
For sales, we divided the number of homes that sold within ninety days of being listed by the total number of homes that were listed on each weekday. The chart shows the percent that sold for each weekday.”
