The September clock, and why it runs ahead of the calendar

A home listed this month meets its buyer in December. Here is how that timing works.

Most people in Southwest Florida think of the real estate year as starting in January, when the traffic on 41 picks up and the restaurants fill. The market itself starts earlier than that. It starts now.

Here is the mechanism. In July, the typical Bonita Springs home took 93 days to go under contract. In Estero it was a little faster. In the City of Naples it was closer to 126. Those are not slow numbers for this market in the off season. They are simply the pace. And they mean that a home that goes live in the first half of September is, on average, going under contract in early December and closing in January, right as the seasonal buyers who drive this region are settling into their winter routines.

That is the part that is easy to miss. The buyer who closes in January did not start looking in January. They booked their flights in September. They spent October scrolling listings from Ohio or Michigan or Connecticut, building a shortlist. By the time they land in November, they already know which 4 or 5 properties they want to walk through. If your home is not on that list by then, it is competing for their second trip, not their first.

A word on what the numbers are actually saying right now, because the headlines have been noisy.

Countywide, the Collier median sale price in July was $599,000, unchanged from a year earlier. Flat. Not up, not down. Meanwhile the average sale price rose sharply, which sounds contradictory until you understand that a handful of large closings at the top of the market pull the average around without moving the median at all. Both figures are correct. Only one of them tells you anything about a typical home, and it is the median.

The other headline you may have seen is about rising inventory. It is true that there are more homes for sale than there were 2 years ago. What is often left out is that the number of new listings arriving each year has been remarkably steady through every cycle, including 2009 and 2021. What changes is how many of them find a buyer. In 2021 the county closed more than 1 sale for every new listing. In the last 2 years it has been closer to 0.6. Inventory here is a demand story, not a supply story. That distinction matters, because it tells you the answer is not to wait for the listings to thin out. It is to be priced and presented for the buyers who are coming.

And they are coming. In Bonita Springs, 55.8% of July closings were cash. In the City of Naples it was 72.7%. Those are not buyers waiting on a rate cut. They are buyers waiting on a season.

For a homeowner who is not planning to sell, none of this requires action. It is simply useful to know that the value of your home is being set, in large part, by a group of people who are 1,200 miles away right now with a laptop open. What they see this fall shapes what your neighborhood is worth by spring.

For a homeowner who has been quietly thinking about it, September is the month the decision has the most room in it. Nothing needs to happen quickly. But the clock is already running, and it helps to know where the hands are.

If it would be useful to see how your community specifically is tracking against these numbers, or simply to talk through what the fall might look like for you, I am glad to do that. No agenda beyond the conversation.