Many times, I am asked this very question by potential sellers and the answer is it depends. Right now we are heading into the spring and a shifting market.

In the beginning of the year, sales usually start to slowly build momentum as we climb out of the winter/holiday doldrums. We are seeing that right now as activity has picked up but with the threat of rising rates, who knows?

In the Spring, more sellers tend to enter the market also due to their desire to move during the summer when children are off from school. More competition is not necessarily good for sellers. I usually like to start working on a listing right before the Spring rather than wait. My advice is to look at your needs as a seller, current market activity and not position your listing to be forgotten because there is a major holiday in one week. I would like to also add that assessing the competing properties for yours will help too. For example, a few years ago, there was a glut of 2bd/2ba apartments in 400 Central Park west. This rarely ever happens. As a result, buyers had more choices. My recommendation was that if the seller could wait 1 month or so, some of these other properties might be in contract and as a result we would have less competition.

Two years ago, I sat down with another seller and there was only 1 similar property in the market in Park West Village on Manhattan’s Upper west side. I advised them to go for it. They did and as a result, we got a very high price due to the lack of competition.

The Author-  Brian Silvestry , a licensed real estate broker, has been selling residential and commercial real estate since 1999. He has sold in every neighborhood from Battery Park City to Washington Heights.