“Days on market”, or DOM, is a trending topic in the real estate community as the number of days listed homes sit before finding (or not!) a buyer has climbed. Housing pessimists like to use this stat to scream “the sky is falling!” and using it as evidence of the pending housing crash…which most of them have been proclaiming since 2012…

On the other side of the aisle, housing optimists scream “homes are still moving fast!”, which is true…but it’s also true that they’re moving, shall we say, less fast, than they were in recent memory.

When it comes to housing and real estate, I try to avoid too much negative or positive spin and stick to realism. The realist in me falls back on data, and in the case of days on market, the data is pretty telling. Yes, DOM has risen. But it’s important to see in the data that DOM has historically been a cyclical thing, and while the number of days a house sits on the market varies each year, on a monthly basis, rises and falls in DOM tend to be seasonal, predictable, and consistent.

Use the graphic below as reference – this is for Sacramento county in California, but similar trends exist around the United States. You can see that in 2021 DOM was substantially lower than DOM in 2024, but in each year DOM increased during the winter time, peaking in December through January, then dipped each Spring. Seasonal trends make a lot of sense – homes may sit longer in the winter for various reasons – the busy holiday seasons keeps some buyers on the sidelines, and weather can delay showings or make homes look less than their best with a landscape that looks drastically better as Spring blooms. With many buyers buying in the short window between the end of one school year and the start of another, it makes sense that homes would sell faster.

So while DOM is up, DOM is also pretty close nationwide to historical averages, and should be expected to continue to ebb and flow with seasonality. Next time you hear the media talking about how homes are sitting for longer, you’ll know better – yes, they’re sitting longer than they were in the Spring, and in the Spring, they’ll be moving faster than they’re moving today assuming historical trends continue.