Time on market – a key indicator for the housing market?

How long it takes to sell a house is one factor that you need to consider when looking at the state of the housing market.

There’s one site that shows this data in an easy to use form. It’s at Home.co.uk – and you can drill down through local information for your area and see lots of useful information. They list the most popular estate agents according to the number of properties they’re marketing, show sold data in nice graphs and of course the Time on Market graphs.

This graph shows the Average Time On Market By Type in Oldham (days). You can search for your area using the little search box on the left too.

This shows that in January 2007 the average time on market was 125 days for all properties and now it’s 312 days. This might give hope to some people who’ve been trying to sell their house for some time.
The biggest increase has been for terraced properties which took only 88 days back in January 2007 but now sit on the market for 332 days. That’s a huge increase of 277%!

This sort of information is useful to house buyers too although there’s a more useful tool we’ll be telling you about soon called property bee that will really open up your eyes!