Economists' Outlook

Housing stats and analysis from NAR's research experts.

EHS in 2014 by the Numbers – Part 2 – Least Common Closing Dates

This blog post was written by Danielle Hale, Director of Housing Statistics, and Hua Zhong, Data Analyst.

You probably know that home closings slow down during the holidays and earlier part of the week.  Here is the data to back up your intuition:

  • As we start the New Year, this is a good time to take a look and recap the year behind us to see what insights 2014 holds for 2015. The last sales data for December 2014 is just now being collected, but we can get a good sense of the year by looking at the data we currently have for the past 12 months.  In our first post, Part 1 we looked at top closing days of 2014.
  • In this list, we see the slowest closing days of 2014. The resulting list depends very much on how you define the eligible days.
  • Very few closings happen on weekends and federal holidays.  Excluding these days as well as Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas, we find that the slowest closing day was January 2, 2014.  Interestingly, there are a few weekend days that performed at least as well as these slow business days.  They were Sunday, November 30, 2014 and Sunday, August 31, 2014. Two other weekend days, Saturday, August 30 and Saturday, May 31, outperformed most other weekends and holidays with respect to number of closed home sales.  As we saw with the top closing days, the end of the month is a popular time for closing and this can even be observed among weekend days as those at the end of a month tend to outperform other weekend days.
  • Because this ranking was compiled with data that was not seasonally adjusted, we see that winter days figure prominently in the list of slowest days for home closings.
  • Those who have been in business a few years can probably expect these seasonal fluctuations, but for those who are new to real estate, take note and plan your vacations accordingly.

Slowest Closing Days

 

This is part 2 of a week-long series on EHS. Check back tomorrow at 12 p.m. ET for the next post in the series.

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