How many showings on average to sell a house? – 2019 update

In Portland your real estate agent has access to the MLS, here called the RMLS which gives an incredible amount of real estate market data, including weekly buyer traffic reports and total inventory reports broken down into active, pending, and sold properties. Basically your real estate agent has access to the information to be able to tell you how many showings on average it takes to sell a house.

Two powerful forces in the real estate market.

Number of buyer showings.

RMLS makes the weekly number of showings available to their subscribers, and their data covers most of northern Oregon from the Coast to past Mt. Hood. Similarly their Washington data covers the southern half of the state.

Showing traffic data is incredibly important, and along with available inventory data gives us the two main ingredients we need in order to sell a client when is the best time to sell a home (also when the worst is).

Number of active homes for sale.

Per number of showings, as one might imagine, the Christmas season is the worst, Thanksgiving time is second to that. The first quarter of the year is slow, and the highest traffic can be found at the end of March through August. However, when you lay on top of that, the amount of inventory per month in that same market, you can find the best time to sell – when inventory is lowest and traffic is highest, and when it is really hard to sell, when traffic might be high but inventory is 10X what it normally is. The numbers can be surprising.

Average number of showings to sell a home.

The third week of September 2019 RMLS reported 26,667 showings in Oregon and Washington. For the entire month of September there were about 105,000 showings. At the moment there are 21,284 active listings (not pending or sold) in RMLS in both Oregon and Washington. This means that those active listings are on average going to get 1.25 visitors this next week, or about 5 visitors on average a month.

Now we have to determine how long it takes to sell a home. Looking through all the data reports RMLS puts out in their Market Action publication, I’d average out the time to sell a home for their entire geographical area at about 4 months (some areas are a little faster, some slower), but 4 months would likely average things out. Four months to sell with 5 showings a month …

How many showings on average does it take to sell a home? The answer is 20.

How many showings will it take to sell my home?

Now that is a different question. If your home is in a really popular area, it may actually take more showings to sell. Home buyers are really attracted by particular areas and may want to tour every home that comes up for sale, even if it isn’t a great match for them – because they want to live in the area so badly.

If your home is on a busy street or close to something buyers might consider negative like a power station or cemetery, it will likely take more showings to sell. This is because they will be attracted by the home and want the home for the price, but ultimately many will decide against because of problems with the location.

If the price is right, the home is pretty standard, and there isn’t really anything to complain about the location, then it might take a little less than 20 showings to sell the home, fewer showings to sell, because you’ll be performing better than some of the problem houses mentioned above.

How long will it take to sell my home?

Luxury homes, condos, and rural properties typically take longer to sell. It might end up taking nearly a year to sell your property (on average). That means it might take nearly a year to get those 20 showings, and these types of properties may be only pulling 1-3 visitors a month.

Detached homes priced at average market value or below in urban areas are highly desirable and will likely get those 20 showings in a very short amount of time, possibly even the first weekend on market. In other words, the number of showings on average it takes to sell a home, doesn’t really answer the question of how long it will take to sell a home. But the average number of showings to sell does help you gauge where you are at currently in your home sale and help generate some expectations.