The Myplace Playbook // 079
Hey Everyone,
You've felt it this week. The light's a bit different. The mornings have a bit of crispness to them. The lake's still warm but the evenings aren't, and a store here in town has already put out chocolate advent calendars. Seriously.
Late August does this every year. It tells you something's ending. I’m still in denial though, I refuse to welcome the cold, just yet.
I want to tell you about the thing that's starting, because most people don't know it exists.
The market has two springs.
Ask anyone when house-hunting season is and they'll say spring. Listings bloom in April, everything moves in May and June, and then it's over for the year.
Half right. There's a second season, and it opens the day after Labour Day.
Every September, a fresh wave of listings hits. Sellers who spent the summer deciding. Families who want to be moved before winter. Estates that finally got sorted. People whose spring plans slipped. They all come to market in the same three or four weeks, and for a short stretch the area has real selection again.
It runs from Labour Day to somewhere around mid-November. Then the snow line drops, the listings thin out, and things go dark until April.
Around here, that window is even more defined than it looks. Nobody in the Kootenays wants to show a house through the winter, and nobody wants to move a couch across a mountain pass in January. If someone lists in September, they mean it.
Fall sellers are different. The calendar is squeezing them. Every week that passes puts their move closer to the snow, and they know it. That makes them realistic on price and flexible on dates in a way the same seller wouldn't have been in May.
And the summer leftovers sweeten further. Houses that sat through July and August at the wrong price tend to get their cuts in September, right when the new listings show up to compete with them. Two kinds of opportunity, arriving together.
The season rewards whoever shows up ready.
The best of the fall market gets picked over in the first three weeks. The good family house at the right price doesn't last until Thanksgiving.
Back in July I told you the fall buyers get made in the summer. This is the part where that comes true. The people who got pre-approved during the dog days, who took the rate hold, who know their number cold, they can see a listing on a Tuesday and write a clean offer by Thursday. In a fresh September market, that speed wins.
The people who start their paperwork in September spend the best weeks of the season getting ready instead of shopping. By the time they're approved, the first wave is gone.
One date before the gates open.
The Bank of Canada announces September 2, the Wednesday before the long weekend. If you took a rate hold this summer, that announcement is background noise. Your number is already locked. That was the whole point.
I'll break down whatever they say in the next edition. For now, it changes nothing about getting ready.
If you're not ready yet, you have two weeks.
That's not a scare line. Two weeks is genuinely enough. Pre-approval takes days, not months, and a rate hold takes about one.
So if fall was always the plan, or if you spent the summer at the lake like a reasonable person and figured you'd deal with this later, later is now. Hit reply, tell me you want to be ready for opening day, and we'll have you set before the first September listing goes up.
The second spring is short. It's also the best-kept secret in this business.
See you at the open houses.
-Andrew
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