Wilmette · Seller strategy
The best month to sell a house in Wilmette
We ran every Wilmette house that went under contract from January 2023 through September 2026 and closed — 1,103 of them — and sorted the results by the month each one was listed. April stands out, and in Wilmette it is also the busiest month for accepted offers.
Part of our Wilmette series: see what it is like to live there on the Wilmette community page, and this month's prices and supply on the Wilmette market statistics page.
The answer
April
1,103 Wilmette single-family detached homes that went under contract between January 2023 and September 2026 and closed, grouped by the month they were listed. Listings per month: January 85 · February 108 · March 131 · April 153 · May 126 · June 122 · July 98 · August 65 · September 92 · October 69 · November 33 · December 21. Source: MRED.
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Chart one
What you get for your house, by the month you list it
Median sale price as a percentage of asking price, grouped by list month. The scale starts at 94% so the differences are visible.
February through June, and December, all closed above 101%; April was the only month above 104%. August, from 65 listings, was the only month below 100%. On a $1.15 million list price, the observed April and August–October median sale-to-list ratios differ by roughly $69,000. That does not mean changing the listing month would make the same house sell for $69,000 more: the months contain different homes.
Chart two
How fast it goes, by the month you list it
Median days from listing to accepted offer.
These are medians, and the median hides a long tail: across the whole period 65% of Wilmette houses went under contract within eight days, but about one in five took more than three weeks and about one in eighteen took over two months. A median of five days does not mean your house sells in a week — it means half of them do. August, November and December listings took noticeably longer in this data; December's 18-day median comes from 21 listings.
Chart three
When buyers actually sign
How many houses were available each month, how many went under contract, and how many showings each listing drew.
Homes available during the monthHomes going under contractShowings per listing (right scale)
Monthly figures
| Month | Homes available | Under contract | Showings per listing |
|---|---|---|---|
| January | 42.3 | 18.0 | 9.1 |
| February | 59.0 | 26.7 | 12.6 |
| March | 65.0 | 32.7 | 12.1 |
| April | 71.3 | 36.0 | 13.2 |
| May | 68.0 | 33.7 | 9.4 |
| June | 71.0 | 28.3 | 8.1 |
| July | 68.7 | 23.0 | 7.5 |
| August | 66.0 | 20.3 | 7.2 |
| September | 71.0 | 29.3 | 6.6 |
| October | 59.0 | 22.3 | 7.5 |
| November | 42.7 | 13.7 | 6.6 |
| December | 30.0 | 8.7 | 6.0 |
In Wilmette, showing activity rose and fell with contracts more than with supply. About 71 detached houses were available in April, and supply stayed close to that level, about 66 to 71 a month, through September. Contracts did not hold up the same way. They peaked at about 36 in April, roughly half of the houses available that month, then fell to about 20 to 23 in July and August, about a third. Showings per listing followed the same arc. Each listing drew about 12 to 13 showings from February through April and about 6.5 to 8 from June through October. September brought a second rise in contracts, to about 29, without a matching rise in showings per listing.
April is the busiest month for accepted offers in Wilmette, with March and May close behind. Unlike some smaller North Shore villages, here the busiest month and the month with the strongest observed results are the same.
Monthly averages for 2023, 2024 and 2025, detached houses. Homes available during the month: houses for sale at the end of the previous month plus new listings that month (MRED via InfoSparks), so each house counts once whether it went under contract, stayed on the market or was withdrawn. Under contract: MRED closed and pending sales by contract month. Showings per listing: MRED via InfoSparks; showing data comes from ShowingTime and counts only showings scheduled through ShowingTime.
What it means
Where April differed
Most April contracts were homes listed in April: 81% of the homes that went under contract in April were April listings, and 16% were March listings still on the market. So April's results belong mainly to homes that came out in April.
April differed at both ends of the range. At the top, the 75th percentile sale-to-list was 112.6% for April listings against 107.7% for all other months. At the bottom, only 18% of April listings sold below asking, compared with 33% in every other month combined, and 75% sold above asking, against 55%.
The pattern held across price levels: split into lower, middle and upper thirds by list price, April listings had the higher median sale-to-list in each third. It also held year to year for 2023, 2024 and 2025 listings, when April had the highest median of any month. In 2026 so far, May and July listings did better than April.
Why that is, this data cannot tell us. Plausible reasons — buyers aiming to move over the summer, sellers bringing well-prepared houses out in spring — are guesses, and we would rather say so than dress one up as a finding.
In this data, one in three Wilmette houses listed outside April sold for less than asking. Among April listings it was fewer than one in five.
153 April listings across four springs, the largest monthly sample in the study. Consistent in 2023, 2024 and 2025; not in 2026 so far. Enough to take seriously, not enough to treat as a law.
Important caveats
What this does not mean
- It does not mean wait. Outside April, every month closed between 98.6% and 103.2% of asking in this data. If you need to move in September, move in September. April's difference in this data is not a reason to hold a house off the market for months.
- April works best when the house is ready. April performed best in this Wilmette data, but timing alone does not overcome poor preparation or pricing. If April is the target, preparation should start early enough for the house to be genuinely ready to launch.
- Late-year listings took longer. November and December listings had median times to contract of 12 and 18 days, from 33 and 21 listings, and nearly half of December listings were still unsold after a month. That is an observed pattern in this data, not a rule about any single house.
Condominiums and townhouses
No single month stands out
We ran the same analysis on 342 Wilmette condominiums and townhouses. Three months had too few listings for a confident monthly ranking (December 8, January 19, November 16), so the results are grouped by season instead.
Attached homes sold close to asking in every season. Summer listings had the strongest observed results in this sample, with the fewest sales below asking and the quickest contracts; winter listings (December–February) had the weakest observed results and took longest. The spring pattern seen for detached houses did not appear here.
For buyers
Read the same chart backwards
From the buyer's side, late summer and autumn showed the clearest signal in this dataset: houses listed in August, September and October closed at a median 100.0% of asking, and 45% sold below their asking price. November and December listings stayed on the market longer, which can leave more room to negotiate.
The trade-off is selection: spring brings the most listings, while autumn and winter bring fewer homes to choose from.
Thinking about an April listing?
Preparing for an April listing starts in February. There is no cost to starting the conversation early.
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