Based on an analysis of outbound home searches on Trulia.com in 2018, Trulia Research’s Felipe Chacón has found that there very little “seasonal gap” in new home searches from colder to warmer climates based on the season or current temperature.
In December, 15% of home searches made in from metros where the average January temperature is below freezing were for homes in parts of the country where January temperatures average 50 degrees or more – a difference of only 1.5% from similar searches made in August. This gap has contracted by .8 percentage points from 2017 and .9 from 2016.
But there’s a difference between enduring a merely “below freezing” winter in the Mid-Atlantic region and surviving a positively frigid cold season in places like the Upper Midwest. And the deeper the freeze, the larger the bump in seasonal cold-hot searches. The percentage-point gap between August and December cold-hot searches is almost four times wider in places where the average December temperature is 5 degrees Fahrenheit or below than it is among metros where the average temperature is “only” between 23 and 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
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