Glencoe · Seller strategy
The best month to sell a house in Glencoe
We ran every Glencoe house that went under contract since January 2023 — 423 of them — and sorted the results by the month each one was listed. One month stands out, though not in the way we first assumed.
Part of our Glencoe series: see what it is like to live there on the Glencoe community page, and this month's prices and supply on the Glencoe market statistics page.
The answer
March
423 Glencoe single-family detached homes that went under contract between January 2023 and September 2026, grouped by the month they were listed. Listings per month: January 25 · February 42 · March 38 · April 50 · May 62 · June 52 · July 34 · August 28 · September 25 · October 28 · November 31 · December 8. Source: MRED. Compiled by Lisa Finks.
Chart one
What you get for your house, by the month you list it
Median sale price as a percentage of asking price, grouped by list month. The scale starts at 94% so the differences are visible.
March and June are the only months that clear 101%. October is the only month with 20 or more listings below 100%; December, from eight listings, was also below. On a $1.6 million list price, the observed March and December median sale-to-list ratios differ by roughly $120,000. That does not mean changing the listing month would make the same house sell for $120,000 more: the months contain different homes, and the December sample is very small.
Chart two
How fast it goes, by the month you list it
Median days from listing to accepted offer.
These are medians, and the median hides a long tail: across the whole period 57% of Glencoe houses went under contract within eight days, but a quarter took more than three weeks and one in ten took over two months. A median of seven days does not mean your house sells in a week — it means half of them do. December showed a 32-day median in just eight listings, too small a sample to rank confidently against the other months.
Chart three
When buyers actually sign
How many houses were available each month, how many went under contract, and how many showings each listing drew.
Homes available during the monthHomes going under contractShowings per listing (right scale)
Monthly figures
| Month | Homes available | Under contract | Showings per listing |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 22.3 | 4.7 | 5.3 |
| February | 31.0 | 11.0 | 7.9 |
| March | 29.3 | 10.3 | 6.8 |
| April | 37.0 | 15.3 | 8.8 |
| May | 38.3 | 13.0 | 7.8 |
| June | 38.7 | 12.7 | 5.4 |
| July | 37.3 | 11.0 | 4.9 |
| August | 35.0 | 10.0 | 4.3 |
| September | 34.0 | 9.0 | 4.3 |
| October | 31.0 | 7.0 | 4.0 |
| November | 31.7 | 8.0 | 4.8 |
| December | 20.7 | 4.0 | 4.3 |
In Glencoe, supply was steadier than buyer activity. From February through November, about 29 to 39 detached houses were available each month. Showings per listing ran highest in February, April and May, about 8 to 9 (6.8 in March). Contracts peaked in April at about 15, roughly 4 in 10 of the houses available that month. From June on, each listing drew about 4 to 5.5 showings, and contracts fell to about 7 to 13 a month, roughly a quarter to a third of the houses available.
April is the busiest month for accepted offers, and most of those homes were listed in April rather than carried over from March. So volume and outcome are answering different questions. April is when the most houses trade; March is when listings did best in this data.
Monthly averages for 2023, 2024 and 2025, detached houses. Homes available during the month: houses for sale at the end of the previous month plus new listings that month (MRED via InfoSparks), so each house counts once whether it went under contract, stayed on the market or was withdrawn. Under contract: MRED closed and pending sales by contract month. Showings per listing: MRED via InfoSparks; showing data comes from ShowingTime and counts only showings scheduled through ShowingTime.
What it means
Where March differed
The obvious explanation is that March listings catch April's buyers. We checked, and that is not what happens: 67% of the homes that went under contract in April were listed in April. Only 24% were March listings still on the market. Most April contracts were homes listed in April, so March carryover does not explain most of April's volume.
At the top of the range, March looked much like the rest of the year: the 75th percentile sale-to-list was 110.7% for March listings against 108.1% for all other months, which is close.
In this sample, March's clearest difference appears on the downside rather than the upside. Only 24% of March listings sold below asking, compared with 41% in every other month combined.
Why that is, this data cannot tell us. Plausible reasons — buyers working to a school-year deadline, sellers bringing their best-prepared houses out first — are guesses, and we would rather say so than dress one up as a finding.
In this data, four in ten Glencoe houses sold for less than they asked. Among March listings it was two in ten.
Consistent across 2023, 2025 and 2026, with 2024 flat. Thirty-eight March listings — enough to take seriously, not enough to treat as a law.
Important caveats
What this does not mean
- It does not mean wait. Among months with 20 or more listings, the month-to-month differences in this data are modest; December's sample is too small to judge. If you need to move in September, move in September. March's difference in this data is not a reason to wait.
- March works best when the house is ready. Our data favors March, but timing alone does not overcome poor preparation or pricing. If March is the target, the work should start early enough that the house is genuinely ready to launch.
- December is too small a sample to rank. December listings showed 32 days to contract and 95.8% of asking, and 62% were still unsold after a month. But only eight houses were listed in a Glencoe December across the whole period, which is too few for a confident monthly ranking, so treat both the direction and the size of the gap with caution.
For buyers
Read the same chart backwards
From the buyer's side, October provides the clearest late-year signal in this dataset: October listings closed at a median 98.3% of asking and only a third beat their asking price. December's observed figures were lower still, but only eight December listings occurred across the study period, too few to rank December confidently.
The trade-off is selection: spring brings the most listings, while autumn and winter bring fewer homes to choose from.
Thinking about a March listing?
Preparing for a March listing starts in January. There is no cost to starting the conversation early.
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