Does the early bird catch the house?

An analysis of online home-search habits finds that West Coast residents are more likely to search in the early morning, while some East Coast residents are late-night searchers.

By Teresa at MSN Real Estate Tue 1:28 PM

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If you’re trying to grab a good house for sale before someone else does, does it help to get up early?

That’s hard to say. But an analysis of when would-be buyers are perusing listings at HomeFinder.com at least tells you when your fellow shoppers are online.

There are night owls and there are early birds, the company found.


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If you’re looking for a house in Miami, we can tell you that being an early bird doesn’t pay. No matter when you see a listing, you won’t find many real-estate agents who will talk to you much before 10 a.m. That’s true of mortgage brokers and title companies, too, though every profession and every city has some early birds.

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In Los Angeles, on the other hand, you may find all kinds of professionals at their desk every morning by 8 a.m. In the HomeFinder analysis, the five cities with the greatest number of searches performed between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m. (local time) were all on the West Coast.

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The earliest risers were in Bellingham, Wash., where 28.2% of home searches were performed during those hours, with 85% of them done on a desktop computer.

Early-morning searchers were also found in Palm Springs, Calif., where 27.4% of searches were done in those hours (25% on a mobile device); Anchorage, Alaska, with 26.7% of searches; Sacramento, Calif., 25.7%; and Irvine, Calif., 25.6%. Only 5% of Irvine searchers were using a mobile device.

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In contrast, some East Coast searchers tended to be night owls. The night owls were also more likely to use mobile devices – browsing while watching TV, perhaps.

In New York City, 18.1% of the searches were done between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m., with 35% of those on mobile devices. That was followed by Austin, Texas, with 17.2% of searches done during those hours; Philadelphia, with 17.1% of searches; Atlanta, 16.4%; and Memphis, Tenn., 16%.

In Memphis, 54% of the late-night searches were done on mobile devices. That was true of 51% of searches in Philadelphia, 44% in Atlanta and 17% in Austin.

Across the United States, 18.5% of searches occurred from 4 a.m. to 10 a.m., and 11.4% occurred between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. Or at least those were the habits of the users of HomeFinder.com.

Trulia found that the peak time for real-estate searches on its site was Sunday and Monday, with more mobile traffic on Sunday and more desktop traffic on Monday – or at least that was how it looked in 2011.

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