Every year around this time I have some version of the same conversation. A family has been thinking about selling the family home in the Bay Area (or thereabouts), and it’s getting late into the year. The fall market is usually pretty decent, but maybe this year, the fall market feels a little soft. As the days get shorter, the holidays get nearer, someone at the table says, “Why don’t we just wait for spring? The market should be better then.” It sounds sensible, and I understand why people say it. But after 23 years and more than 460 closed transactions, I’ve learned that “wait for spring” is usually a feeling more than a plan, and the data from the last twelve months shows exactly how expensive that feeling can get.
Before you push your sale into next year, it helps to understand why spring is good in the first place, what actually happened to the sellers who waited last year (2025), and what you’re really betting on when you decide to hold.
Key Takeaways
Spring’s advantage for sellers comes from a short window when buyers return after the holidays before most new listings hit the market, and in San Jose that window has moved up to early February while the premium has gotten smaller. Many sellers who pulled their homes in late 2025 to try again in spring came back into one of the most crowded relisting markets in the country, and more than a third of relisted homes nationally came back at a lower price. With mortgage rates above 7% and inventory growing, waiting is a bet on a forecast nobody controls, and for older adults and their families the bigger risks are usually life events, carrying costs, and a family consensus that wears thin over time. A home that’s priced right and well prepared can sell this fall, and if you do decide to wait, the smart move is to use those months to get ready so you can list the moment the early-year window opens.
Why Spring Is Usually Good for Sellers
Spring isn’t magic, and nothing about sunshine in April makes a buyer write a stronger offer. Spring tends to favor sellers for one reason, which is that for about eight to twelve weeks, the balance between buyer demand and available inventory usually tips decidedly in the seller’s favor. Buyers come back in force after the holidays, many of them hoping to move over the summer before the school year starts, and they show up sooner than the full wave of new listings arrives. For a relatively short window of time, there are lots of people shopping and not that many homes to choose from, and that’s when competition and price pressure peak.
Realtor.com’s 2026 Best Time to Sell report, which looked at seasonal listing data from 2018 through 2025, captures this well. During the best national week, listings historically got 16.7% more views than an average week and sold about 17% faster, roughly nine days quicker than normal, while about 18.9% fewer homes needed a price reduction. The report specifically pointed out that the advantage comes from getting in before the later spring surge in new listings, which climbs more than 38% above early-year levels. In other words, the sweet spot isn’t “spring” as a season. It’s the gap between when buyers wake up and when the rest of the sellers do.
That distinction matters because once the other sellers show up, the advantage shrinks fast. By late spring you’re not competing in a thin market anymore, you’re one listing among many, and buyers have the luxury of choice again…or more choice, at the very least.
In the Bay Area, the Peak Comes Early
Zillow publishes an annual analysis of the best time to list in the largest U.S. metros, and Silicon Valley consistently shows up as one of the most time-sensitive markets in the country. In its 2025 analysis of 2024 sales, Zillow found that San Jose sellers who listed in the second half of March got 5.3% more than at any other time of year, which worked out to about $93,200 on a typical home. In San Francisco the peak landed in the second half of April at 3.2%, or about $38,600.
Now look at what happened in the 2026 version, which analyzed 2025 sales. The San Jose peak moved all the way up to the first two weeks of February, with a 3.1% premium worth about $53,800 on a typical home, and San Francisco’s best window shifted to late May at 1.9%. So the premium got smaller and the San Jose window moved earlier, and both of those shifts tell you something. When everyone knows spring is the time to sell, the smart sellers try to beat the crowd, and the crowd keeps arriving sooner.
Here’s the practical takeaway for a family sitting at the kitchen table in October. If you decide to wait for spring, you’re not really waiting six months for a great market. You’re waiting for a window that may open in February, may only last a few weeks, and that you’ll share with every other seller who made the same decision you did. If you’re not completely ready the moment it opens, with the house prepped, repairs done, and the family in agreement, it’s easy to miss it and end up listing into the crowded part of the season anyway. And, unfortunately, there’s no reliable way to tell in “real time” when the peak will hit, and when it will slip away.
What Happened to the Sellers Who Waited Last Year
We don’t have to guess how the “pull it and try again in spring” strategy plays out. A lot of sellers ran that exact experiment over the last twelve months, and the results are well documented.
According to Realtor.com’s November 2025 housing trends report, the national ratio of delistings to new listings hit 0.27 in October 2025. Put another way, for every 100 homes that came on the market, 27 were pulled off without selling. Delistings that October were up about 38% from the year before, 2025 ended up with the highest delisting rate since Realtor.com started tracking it in 2022, and in some markets like Denver the ratio reached 39 per 100. Homes were sitting a median of 84 days, about ten days longer than the prior year.
Most of those sellers had the same plan. Take a break over the holidays, come back fresh in spring, and get the price they wanted the first time. Redfin’s data shows what happened next. Delistings hit a record 112,788 in December 2025, and in January 2026 nearly 45,000 homes that had been delisted the prior year came back on the market. That was the highest January figure in Redfin’s records going back to 2016, and it represented a record 3.6% of all homes for sale. More than a third of those relisted homes, 36.1%, came back at a lower price than they originally started at.
The local numbers are even more striking. The San Jose metro had the highest share of relistings of any major market Redfin tracks. In January 2026, 257 homes that had been delisted in 2025 came back on the market here, which was 12.5% of everything for sale that month. Think about what that means if you were one of those sellers. You came back expecting a fresh start, and roughly one out of every eight homes competing with you belonged to another seller who had the exact same idea.
Buyers notice, too. Every relisted home carries its history with it, and buyers and their agents can see the original list date, the prior price, the days on market, and the fact that it came off and went back on. A home that comes back in January at a lower price doesn’t look fresh to a buyer. It looks like a home that didn’t sell, and buyers negotiate accordingly.
What You’re Really Betting On When You Wait
When someone says “let’s wait for spring,” what they’re really saying is that they believe the spring market will offer superior supply/demand dynamics that will allow them to sell for a higher price than they can in, say, late summer or fall. And of course, the data show that on balance, sellers do get more for their homes, usually, at some point in spring. But that’s a seasonal pattern, or a forecast, and it’s worth looking honestly at what that forecast depends on right now.
Compass’s September 2026 Monthly Economic Summary laid out a pretty sobering picture. The 10-year Treasury yield pushed above 5.1%, its highest level since 2007, and mortgage rates followed to around 7.25%, the highest in 28 months. The Fed raised rates for the first time in three years, and bond markets are now pricing in more hikes in October and December. Pending sales over the prior four weeks were running about 4% below the same period last year, with the weakness concentrated at lower price points, while the luxury segment has held up better thanks to a stock market that’s up nearly 16% from a year ago. On the supply side, Compass expects inventory to grow 2% to 5% for the year, while home prices are up only about 1.5% year over year nationwide.
Compass was also careful to say this isn’t a distressed market, since mortgage delinquencies are near 1% and foreclosures remain very low, and I agree with that read. But a market with rising rates, softening demand, and growing inventory is not one where waiting automatically pays off. Nobody can tell you where mortgage rates will be in February or March. If they come down, more buyers may come back and that’s great. If they keep climbing the way they have since late summer, the spring buyer pool could be smaller and more rate-sensitive than the one you’re looking at today, and you’d be facing it alongside a fresh wave of relisted homes.
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The Risks of Waiting That Nobody Puts on the Spreadsheet
The market risk is the one people argue about, but in my work with older adults and their families it’s rarely the biggest one. These are the risks I see most often when families decide to hold off.
Life doesn’t wait for the market. Most of my clients are selling because something real is happening in their lives. A parent is moving to assisted living, a spouse has passed, a fall made the stairs impossible, or the family has finally agreed it’s time to downsize. Six months is a long time when someone is 82, and I’ve seen plenty of families who planned a calm spring sale end up selling under pressure in the middle of winter because a health event forced the timeline. That’s the worst of both worlds. Zillow made the same point in its 2026 report, noting that most sellers simply can’t time the market because life events are what drive the move.
Carrying costs keep adding up. Every month the house sits, someone is paying property taxes, insurance, utilities, gardening, maintenance, and often care costs for the parent who has already moved. If the home is vacant, there’s added insurance and security exposure on top of that. Those dollars rarely show up when families compare “now” against “spring,” but they come straight out of the proceeds.
Your competition grows instead of shrinking. As the Redfin numbers show, waiting doesn’t take you out of the market, it moves you into a more crowded one. If a meaningful share of this fall’s sellers pull their homes and come back in January, your house is competing with all of them at once.
The family gets tired. This one is underrated. Selling a longtime family home is emotional, and the decision often involves siblings in different cities with different opinions. Momentum is valuable, and when a family has done the hard work of agreeing to sell and then puts it on ice for six months, I often watch the consensus erode. Someone changes their mind, someone wants to try renting it out, and a decision that took a year to reach starts over from scratch.
The rate drop you’re waiting for might not come. Plenty of people were confident a year ago that rates would be meaningfully lower by now, and the Compass data shows how that turned out. Building your plan around a rate forecast means betting your family’s equity on something nobody controls.
The Case for Selling Now, Even in a Softer Market
None of this means fall and winter are easy seasons to sell, because they aren’t. But there are real advantages to listing in a quieter stretch of the year, and families tend to overlook them.
The biggest one is that you’re competing with fewer homes. Inventory thins out as the year winds down, so a well-prepared home stands out instead of blending into a crowded spring lineup. The buyers who are actively shopping in October and November tend to be serious ones, people who are relocating, who have already sold their own place, or who simply don’t want to fight a spring bidding war. In Silicon Valley many of those buyers work in tech, and they have both the means and the motivation to get settled.
Selling now also lets you set the timeline on your own terms. You can close on a schedule that fits your parent’s move (a rent back after closing can help here), rather than rushing later because spring got derailed by a medical event or a family disagreement. And you lock in your sale before you find out what the spring market actually looks like, which takes one big unknown off the table.
The key is pricing it correctly from day one. Most of the homes that were delisted last year didn’t fail because of the season. They failed because they were priced for the market the sellers wanted rather than the one they had, and then they sat until buyers stopped paying attention. A home that’s priced right, prepared well, and marketed properly will sell in October. A home that’s priced for 2022 won’t sell in October 2026 or in April 2027.
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When Waiting Actually Makes Sense
I don’t think everyone should list tomorrow, and I’d be doing you a disservice if I said so. Waiting can be the right call if the house genuinely needs work that will pay for itself, if the family truly isn’t ready emotionally, or if your loved one’s next home isn’t settled yet. In those cases the smart approach may be to treat the next few months as preparation time rather than waiting time. Get the repairs done, clear out decades of belongings, get the trust and estate paperwork in order, and plan to be fully ready to list in late January or early February. Given how early the Silicon Valley peak has been landing in Zillow’s data, that’s when you’d want to be on the market anyway.
And if your home is currently listed? What probably doesn’t make sense is pulling a home off the market, doing nothing to it, and relisting at the same price in spring while hoping for a different result. That’s exactly the pattern the 2025 and 2026 data shows didn’t work for a lot of people.
But if your home isn’t currently listed, and you’re trying to figure out if it’s better to list now, late in the year, or wait for spring of next year, I think you need to ask yourself a question: if I knew that by waiting I would lose $100,000, would I have to wait? If the answer is yes, you have to wait, then wait. If the answer is there’s really nothing stopping you from listing now, you need to give that some serious consideration. Here in Q4 2026, it does not seem, at present, that with rising rates and diminished overall affordability that we’re looking at a particularly ebullient spring market next year.
How I Help Families Make This Decision
When I sit down with a family, we look at three things together. First, what’s actually happening in your specific neighborhood and price range right now, rather than national headlines. Second, what it truly costs you each month to hold the house, including the costs people forget. Third, what’s going on in the family’s life and whether the timeline really has room to wait. Once those are on the table the answer is usually pretty clear, and it becomes a decision the family makes with real information instead of a hunch about spring.
If you’re weighing whether to sell now or wait, I’m happy to walk through it with you. You can book a 30-minute strategy call here, or reach my office at (408) 413-3087.
Sources
- Compass International Holdings Market Research, Monthly Economic Summary, September 2026 (September 25, 2026)
- Zillow, Best Time to List 2026, analysis of 2025 home sales (March 18, 2026)
- Zillow, Best time to sell analysis of 2024 home sales (March 5, 2025)
- Redfin, Home relistings report, January 2026 (March 5, 2026)
- Realtor.com, November 2025 Monthly Housing Trends Report, as reported by The MortgagePoint
- Realtor.com, 2026 Best Time to Sell Report, as reported by National Mortgage News
Frequently Asked Questions
Is spring really the best time to sell a house in Silicon Valley?
Historically it has been, but the peak arrives earlier than most people expect. Zillow’s analysis of 2024 sales found the best window in San Jose was the second half of March, and its analysis of 2025 sales moved it to the first two weeks of February. By April or May you’re often competing with far more listings.
Should I take my house off the market and relist in spring?
Only if you’re going to use that time to fix whatever kept it from selling, which is usually price, condition, or presentation. Redfin found that 36.1% of homes relisted in January 2026 came back below their original list price, and buyers can see a home’s full listing history.
How many homes were delisted in 2025?
Realtor.com reported that by October 2025 about 27 homes were being delisted for every 100 new listings nationally, and 2025 had the highest delisting rate since it began tracking in 2022. Redfin counted a record 112,788 delistings in December 2025 alone.
Will mortgage rates be lower in spring?
Nobody can say for sure, and recent history argues for caution. As of September 2026, Compass reported rates around 7.25%, the highest in 28 months, with the Fed raising rates and markets expecting further hikes before year end.
What does it cost to wait six months to sell?
It depends on the home, but property taxes, insurance, utilities, maintenance, and any care costs for a parent who has already moved continue every single month. A vacant home adds security and insurance considerations, and all of it comes directly out of your proceeds.
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