If you’re currently searching for a home in Kansas City – not online but physically touring homes with a Kansas City Realtor – you know that one of your biggest limitations is available daylight time. Now What?

So You Want More Time to View Homes?

If you’re currently searching for a home in Kansas City – not online but physically touring homes with a Kansas City Realtor – you know that one of your biggest limitations is available daylight time. That’s about to change over Spring Break as we move to daylight savings time.

Starting in Early November each year, sunset happens before 6PM. That makes looking at homes on weekdays after work nearly impossible. Kansas City home buyers don’t like looking at homes in the dark. It is to hard to get excited about the curb appeal when you can’t see it, don’t you agree?

This past weekend, sunset will be around 6:30PM but, starting this week, you’ll have an extra hour of daylight to view homes with sunset after 7:30PM. By mid April, sunset moves to around 8PM and by mid-summer you have until 8:30PM.

We all know the real estate market in Kansas City is better in the Spring and Summer. Nearly every home buyer and home seller tell in the winter that they may wait until the spring to buy or sell. The accepted reason is that Spring/Summer is a more convenient time for making moves, especially for families with children in school. But I also think there are secondary factors.

One of the main secondary factors is the notion of “daylight shopping hours”. It’s just easier to buy a Kansas City house when you have more daylight to work with. Also, I think Kansas City home buyers actually get rejuvenated in the spring and feel more like buying in warmer weather with longer days. It is no fun looking at homes in 6 inches of snow and in 10 degree weather. 

If you are in Kansas City right now, on the cusp of Spring Break with this nice weather we’re having, don’t you just feel happier and don’t you want to get outside and do something? My kids have gotten over their winter cabin fever this week. I think the basketball court has been filled with classmates from sun up to sun down all week. I’ll bet half of us are going to start showing off our legs by wearing shorts again this week. 

We sort of wake up in the Spring and something inside us  within our Psyche – is activated by sunny long days. Perhaps it’s a primal gene related to shelter and physical movement. We’ve been hunkered down for the long winter, with short days and colder weather. This winter was a terrible winter with all of the snow storms. Now we want to get out and move around, go places, work on our houses and yards, plant trees, trim hedges, etc. 

Drive through neighborhoods this weekend, you’ll see it happening in Amber Hills Estates, Cedar Creek, South Hampton and in the Havencroft subdivisions. This week starts spring everywhere in Kansas City.

In doing these things, we start noticing whether or not our current homes are suitable and we start thinking about things we’d like to have that we don’t. For many, one thought leads to another, and next thing you know, you’re browsing Kansas City homes for sale on the computer, for no particular reason. It’s not like you’ve decided to move. You’re just curious. Then you see a house you really like, and you mutter to yourself a seemingly harmless, “Hmm”. Then “Hey honey, come look at this”.

Should you resist this stirring inside? 

A sudden and mild dissatisfaction with your dream home and a yearning for something bigger and better, maybe a different location? Maybe you want to move closer to school. For most people, yes. You should resist. You don’t need to move. You don’t need a new home in Olathe, Overland Park or Gardner. The Kansas City home you have is perfectly fine. You’re tricking yourself into thinking you need more. You really don’t need more, you just want more, or you simply want something different.

For others, yes, it’s time to think seriously about the pros and cons of a move up, or a move down, or a lateral move to a different location in Kansas City. Your stage of life, age of kids, opinion of schools, new job location, extracurricular interests and many other things will factor into this. 

When Pam and Toby started looking this spring they needed a bigger home for their daughter they are adopting. Although we looked at a few homes this past winter, the homes we viewed this week looked brighter, fresher and bigger. 

The sun has that magic power, you know? Rob and Lisa started looking at homes because they have been renting and they decided that the present time is the best time to start looking. I think we found the perfect home for Rob and Lisa.

If you catch the Spring in a Kansas City house hunting bug, even if just window shopping online, try to write an actual pros and cons list of the outcomes that will result from a move, both financial and lifestyle related. This will help you determine whether you’re having nutty thoughts based on emotional impulse, or if there are in fact actual measurable improvements to your life that a move will bring about.

Anyway, go put on some shorts and get out in the yard with a rake, or start going around the exterior of your house with a caulk gun and see where you’re thoughts lead you. If it’s back inside searching Kansas City real estate for sale online, then you might prove my point.

RE/MAX sells more homes than any other real estate company.

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Blog post written by the Dowell Taggart Team of RE/MAX Best Associates

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