Spring is typically the season for home listings, but for three key reasons, home sellers should consider listing their properties this fall.

By Peter Ricci

Autumn is a season of many things – pumpkins, darkening foliage, and, of course, Jack Skellington – but it is not a season known for selling homes. As many an agent will attest, home sellers often wait until the spring to list their properties, understandably equating the warmer temperatures with a more active base of prospective homebuyers.

As we’ll detail with three easy reasons, though, autumn 2012 may prove to be a fertile real estate climate for your home sellers.

1. There is Little Competition – As we just pointed out, the typical home selling rationale is that homes sell better in the spring, so there will be naturally less competition in September and October in the real estate markets; even more importantly, though, recent surveys from Redfin on home sellers suggest that we’re in the midst of a massive drawback in active listings, which will allow your home sellers’ property to stand out even more.

2. The Process is Quicker – The post-boom housing market has been dogged by lending horror stories and of normal transactions taking months upon months to complete, but new data from the National Association of Realtors found that median listing time was down 30 percent, and as KCM Blog recently pointed out, the slowdown of refinancing and purchase applications with banks will allow them to focus more fully on mortgage applications.

3. Time is Right to Move On Up – As the latest Case-Shiller from Standard & Poor’s demonstrated, housing prices have bottomed, and after falling 30 percent from their June/July 2006 peak, they are beginning to rise; thus, if you have clients who were looking sell their property and capitalize on all those crazy, post-boom deals we kept seeing in 2009 and 2010, now is the time to list.