Should You List Before the Holidays, or Wait Until Spring
Timing the Market
If your home has been sitting on the market as the weather turns, you are probably asking yourself the same question a lot of Portland sellers ask this time of year: pull it now and try again in the new year, ride it out through the holidays, or hold off until spring altogether. There is no single right answer, but the data on how Portland's market actually moves through the winter can help you make a more informed decision.
What the Numbers Actually Show
We looked at three years of Portland metro market data, from September 2023 through August 2026, and a clear seasonal pattern shows up every year.
Days on market does not peak in November or December, the months that feel the slowest. It peaks in January and February, averaging 82 days, compared to 64 days in November. That is because a home listed in the fall carries its days on market forward through the entire slow season. By the time January and February buyers are looking, homes that have been sitting since October show a number that can work against a seller, whether or not the home itself is any less desirable.
Then March arrives, and the market visibly shifts. New listings jump 25 percent from February to March, and pending sales jump 28 percent in that same window. Buyer demand has actually been building quietly since January, but March is where it becomes obvious. This is not a myth agents repeat out of habit, it shows up clearly in the numbers every year in this data set.
The Case for Pulling Your Listing Over the Holidays
If your home has been on the market for a while without an offer, one option worth considering is a break of four to eight weeks over the holidays, then relisting fresh at the start of the year.
There is a real mechanical reason this can help, not just a perception one. We called RMLS directly to confirm exactly how this works, and the details matter. If a listing is canceled or expires and stays off market for 30 days or more, it comes back under a brand new listing number with the days on market count back at zero. Simply withdrawing a listing and putting it right back on does not reset anything, the days on market carries over as if it never left. The 30-day gap is what actually matters.
A seasoned agent pulling up the property history will still see the full picture either way, that part never resets. But for buyers browsing listings and using days-on-market as a quick filter, a fresh listing number genuinely reads differently than one that has been sitting since October. Pairing the relist with something else new, a different front-of-house photo taken in better light or a different season, is something we do in this situation too, since it reinforces that fresh feeling rather than just resetting a number in the background.
The Case for Waiting Until March
If your timeline has real flexibility, the data makes a strong case for waiting rather than listing into the slowest stretch of the year at all. Buyer activity is meaningfully higher in March than at any point in the preceding four months, and days on market drops back down from its January and February peak once that activity picks up. A home listed into a bigger, more active buyer pool has a real advantage over one competing for a much smaller audience in December.
Of course, waiting has its own tradeoffs. Life circumstances, not market timing, are often what actually decide when someone needs to sell, and there is nothing wrong with prioritizing your own timeline over squeezing out the theoretically ideal market window.
What Actually Makes Sense for You
There is no universal answer here, and we would rather walk through your specific situation than hand you a generic rule. If your home has been sitting and you have some flexibility, a holiday reset with a genuinely new listing number is worth serious consideration. If you can wait until spring altogether, the data supports that patience paying off. And if your timeline is fixed regardless of season, that is a perfectly reasonable reason to move forward now.
For a closer look at where Portland's market stands heading into fall, read our latest market report for August.
Kim Campbell & Francisco Salgado
Licensed Oregon Realtors
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