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Palo Alto · when to sell The spring market is real. The spring premium is not.

Every Palo Alto single-family sale from 2021 to 2025 — 1,986 of them — sorted by the month the seller chose to list. The busiest month gets 12.0% of the year’s listings and the quietest gets 2.0%. What they sold for barely moves.

What sellers do

Half the year’s houses arrive in four months.

March alone carries 12.0% of the year’s listings. December carries 2.0% — about one house for every 6 that arrive in March.

Share of the year’s Palo Alto single-family listings that begin in each month. March is the busiest at 12.0%; December the quietest at 2.0%. 6.2%Jan9.8%Feb12.0%Mar11.6%Apr11.5%May7.8%Jun8.2%Jul9.0%Aug10.5%Sep7.8%Oct3.7%Nov2.0%Dec
Where the year’s listings actually fall. Five years, 1,986 sales. Nearly half of them — 44.9% — start in the four months from February to May. The three months from October to December take 13.4% between them. Pale bars are months with fewer than 80 sales across the whole five years.

Source: MLSListings. Palo Alto · single-family homes · sold, listed 2021–2025. n = 1,986. Medians. Compiled 2026-09-28.

What they got for it

And the month barely shows up in the price.

Same five years, same houses, measured against what each one first asked. Every month of the year closes above it.

Median sale price against original asking price, by the month the house was listed. Every month sits above the asking price; the range across the whole year is about five percentage points. the asking price +1.5% Jan +3.8% Feb +3.6% Mar +2.8% Apr +3.8% May +2.8% Jun +0.7% Jul +4.4% Aug +3.1% Sep +4.1% Oct +6.2% Nov +5.8% Dec
The same five years, by what the houses got. Every month closes above the asking price, and the spread from the weakest month to the strongest is about five percentage points — against a difference in how many people list of roughly six to one. The two softest months are January and July: the gaps either side of the two rushes, not the depth of winter.

Source: MLSListings. Palo Alto · single-family homes · sold, listed 2021–2025. n = 1,986. Medians. Compiled 2026-09-28.

Side by side

Three times the competition, and nothing to show for it.

February – May

3.4%

over asking, median

Sold above asking
63%
Days on market
8
Share of the year’s listings
45%
Houses
892

October – December

5.1%

over asking, median

Sold above asking
66%
Days on market
8
Share of the year’s listings
13%
Houses
266

The autumn houses did better, in the same number of days, with roughly a third as many other houses on the market beside them. Be careful with the size of that gap, though: the 66% column is lifted by November and December, which carry 73 and 39 sales between 2021 and 2025. October on its own — 154 sales, a sample as solid as any spring month — came in at 4.1% over asking, against spring’s 3.4%.

So the careful version is not “list in November”. It is that the four months half of Palo Alto picks bought those sellers nothing they could not have had in October, and cost them the attention of every buyer who was looking at forty other houses the same weekend.

Before anyone reschedules anything

The year matters more than the month.

This is the chart that stops the page becoming advice.

Median sale-to-asking ratio by listing month, drawn separately for each of the five years. The lines are far apart vertically, showing that which year a house sold in mattered more than which month. the asking price20212022202320242025JanFebMarAprMayJunJulAugSepOctNovDec
One line per year, same measure. Pooled across all five years the gap between the best and worst month is about 3.7 percentage points. Within any single year it ranges from 4.7 to 12.1, and the same month can differ by 7.3 points from one year to the next. The seasonal signal is smaller than the year-to-year noise around it — which is why this page does not end by naming a month.

Source: MLSListings. Palo Alto · single-family homes · sold, listed 2021–2025. n = 1,986. Medians. Compiled 2026-09-28.

Across the five years, the best month to have listed was November in 2021, January in 2022, November in 2023, December in 2024 and February in 2025. Not once was it March, April or May — three of the four months that half of Palo Alto picks.

The thin months are genuinely thin

November and December carry 73 and 39 sales across the whole five years. The quarter they sit in carries 266 and is worth reading; the two months on their own are not. They are drawn pale on the charts above for that reason.

Whoever lists in December is not a random seller

People who put a house on the market in the middle of the holidays usually have a reason to, and that makes them better prepared and more decisive than average. The houses differ too: December’s median price per square foot is $2,229 against about $1,904 in spring. Some of the autumn result is the season. Some of it is who chooses it.

The two soft months are not the ones you would guess

The weakest months to have listed were July and January — the gaps either side of the two rushes, when buyers have gone quiet but sellers have not. Not the depth of winter.

None of this is a forecast

It is a record of what 1,986 houses did between 2021 and 2025, and rates, inventory and the mood of the market move faster than the calendar does.

So what do you do with it

Stop treating the date as the decision.

The useful conclusion is not a month. It is that the month is a much weaker force than sellers are told — worth a few points at most, and swamped by the year, the street, the preparation and the price. If waiting until March means listing a house that is ready, wait. If it means sitting through the autumn with a house that is already ready, in order to arrive in the busiest four months of the year alongside everyone else, the data does not support it.

The one thing on this page that is genuinely seasonal is the competition. That is the variable worth planning around, and it runs the opposite way to the advice.

Ask what this year looks like for your street

Or read what the preparation actually involves, which is the part of the calendar that does change the number — and how long a house takes to sell here, where the two weeks that matter turn out to matter far more than the month.

Where the numbers come from

Every figure on this page, and how to check it.

  • 1,986 sales. Every single-family home in Palo Alto that sold and closed between January 2021 and 2025, from MLSListings. Condominiums, townhouses and multi-family are excluded — mixing them moves the price-per-square-foot figures without meaning anything.
  • Sorted by list date, not close date. A house that closed in April was listed in February. Sorting by close date describes when escrows ended and puts every season about six weeks late.
  • Measured against the original asking price — the first number the house was advertised at, not a reduced one. A reduction followed by a full-price offer is not a sale at asking.
  • Complete years only. 2026 is still running and is left out of the month-by-month figures, because a part-year adds observations to the early months and none to the late ones. A further 45 sales were listed before 2021; they are excluded because the export only catches the slowest of them, which would drag the early figures down.
  • Medians, not averages. One $30M sale moves an average and does not move a median, and this market produces those.
  • Updated 2026-09-28. Next January’s figures will be added as a further line rather than replacing these, so the page gets longer-sighted each year instead of starting again.

Maggie Ma · DRE #02117367 · Keller Williams Palo Alto

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