The first and second purchases are the hardest and slowest. 

With that said I have been doing this for 20 years and historically the five weeks between Thanksgiving and the new Year are always the slowest for us. 

Louis...it rarely gets cold enough to really need to go all the way, and there are additional, knock-on effects involved in turning off heat to a place for a long time that you can avoid if you just keep the thermostat at 55 degrees and, when the coldest weather is projected, you set up the lowest faucet in the place to the slowest steady run for the duration of the coldest temperatures.

That s lowest I have ever seen.

Things may be tied up in legal issues or whatever, but the big banks seem to move slowest.

Interview a few agents for this. this month is the slowest month to sell in most markets.

OK, I'm shopping the crap out of this through aaaaaaaaallllllll the brokered channels, because I can broker it to the slowest bank on the planet and we will close on time, if that slowest bank on the planet hypothetically has the best interest rate pricing.

@Erin Malone I do not think you should be overly concerned as it IS the slowest time of the year for rentals.

With multiple escrows open at once, you want to use the same lender for both so you don't have a last minute loan rejection of whichever one would have closed last(1), and plan to close both at the same time -- specifically, whenever the slowest of the two is ready to close.

Regarding efficiency, I always find it interesting that window replacements often have the slowest payback in terms of energy savings to cost of retrofit compared to other upgrades, but it's certainly true that it's one of the first things folks look at.