I was recently talking to a friend about her experience with a realtor. The realtor told her to take their house off the market for winter, put it back on in spring. My friend was not pleased, because it wasn't as if they were putting their house on the market just in case, they wanted to sell!
I don't think its any secret that the real estate market takes a dip in the cold New England winters. It's hard to gauge a yard and everything that goes into a house when there is 3 feet of snow outside. Most times you can't even see the driveway and are forced to rely on the nice pictures they took in warmer months. But, we all know pictures can lie. When looking we fell in love with a few houses that were new, modern, awesome... and in reality were nothing of the sorts - they just had well taken pictures.
Since real estate dips in winter, it may be a good time for buyers to get a good deal, since there is probably a shortage of showings and if the seller in anxious, they may be more willing to negotiate then in the warm months when there may be a lot more action. I don't know if this is true, but my intellect tells me its a possibility.
In that same conversation, the idea of open houses came up. I have personally witnessed that open houses can be a bust and a waste of time. But, I am now a believer. Honestly, we would have never ended up in this house was it not for an open house. We had zero intention of buying and just to be nosy wanted to see what the inside of this house was like and we were bored. So we came to an open house here..... Now we live here. We were the only one to come through multiple weekends of open houses, but the point.... we bought it!
Anyway, I digress... busying a home in the winter, or end of fall going into the winter is frankly a pain in the ass. If you are like us, you are forgoing extending your move in to do work on the house so that you can get in and be IN your new home. What this forces you to do, as you figure out where everything will go, is to load your garage. Then winter hits.... and keeps hitting. The garage... it stays full and unorganized.
We've been lucky enough to move things around so I can park in the garage during snow storms, but it takes moving a bit of stuff each time. For us also, we had no where else to put our wood for the wood stove, or enough good weather (and time with two kids) to chop wood.
The other issue, many indoor projects are best done with the windows open. Painting, wall deconstruction, even just freshening up a house that hasn't been lived in for a while (or that smells like someone else). My husband and I laugh about how much we just want a day to clean out the garage.
