Does buying at a certain part of the year make more sense/$?

[Steven S.]

I have a lot of residential market data for California and recently put this together, quite shocking!

Developer #1 & #2 are competitors who both buy projects at a 20% estimated return level. They do the same fix & flip projects, produce the same quality, in the same 6-7 month timeframe. 

Their key difference: Developer #1 buys in Q4-Q1 (October to March), Developer #2 buys in Q2-Q3 (April to September).

Who do you want to be, Developer #1 or #2?

Of course Developer #1, it's all based on the market's $/sf appreciation, which is quite cyclical in the Los Angeles area:

Developer #2 yields under 1/2 of what #1 yielded, simply due to when he decided to buy his properties:

I'll leave you with a few more Los Angeles-area overlays where you will see the same thing (the above are all for Sherman Oaks 91401):

Don't forget the last leg of the data is not fully-representative, they fill-up as transactions occur. So the market is not crashing, I made this in early October so there were barely any Q4 closes:

Do you think this applies to your market? Do you already buy during this time?

In the San Fernando Valley & West-LA, it looks like if you were Developer #1 you could have just bought the fixers in Q4-Q1, done nothing, put them on the market Q3 (listing-only MLS service or something), and make at least ~10% every time with no work done (more than enough to cover the carry). After how many years of this pattern would you bet on it?

[Jim K.]

I can tell you that the best time to close on a single-family house in a Pittsburgh ghetto is mid-December, about a week before Christmas. The best offer to make is all-cash and no contingencies.

If I could, I would take a big red bag of cash to a seller's house and bargain the purchase price down with wrapped stacks slapped one at a time on his living room coffee table.

"Ho-ho-ho, 'tis the season to sell me your crapshack cheap."