I’ve always maintained that there are deals to be had in the real estate market around Christmas time; it just takes patience and perseverance as a buyer.

Well, I’ve snagged my first great “deal” nine days before Christmas, and I attribute this 100% due to the time of year and the circumstances…

Some people say “the market never sleeps,” and I may have uttered this phrase from time to time.

But the buyers and sellers within the market sleep, get lazy, take time off, and often let their guard down, and this causes gaps in an otherwise efficient market.

A few years ago, I got a great deal on a house in Leaside for a couple of friends of mine, simply because the listing came out on Spring Break.  That story can be read here.

On this particular Spring Break, all the “big” real estate agents who work Leaside were away on vacation with their families.  In addition, many of the potential buyers in the area were also away with their families, and thus there were very few people paying attention when a bungalow hit the market at $589,000.

My friends were willing to go up to about $635,000 on the house, which was more than fair, or so we thought.

Bungalows were being snapped up with regularity, as was just about anything else in the area.

But with the complete lack of activity in the Leaside real estate market on Spring Break, and with the three-feet of snow that had accumulated on the roads in the space of seven days, there were no other buyers at the table!

We got the house for the asking price; $589,000!

I attributed this “deal” to nothing other than timing.

And I feel the same way about Christmas-time as I do about Spring Break.

My office is a ghost-town right now, as most real estate agents have already packed it in for the year.

Some agents leave as soon as they (or their assistant…) turns the page on the calendar from November to December…

But there are still new listings for houses and condos coming onto the market every day, and even if there weren’t new listings – there are still thousands of listings that already exist!

Mid-December is an incredibly slow time for real estate sales; I think that goes without saying.  Many buyers decide to put their search on hold as they partake in holiday parties with colleagues, friends, and family.  And many sellers hold off on listing their properties for the same reasons – the inconvenience of such a massive undertaking during an otherwise relaxed and jolly time of year.

Over this past weekend, I took my client, Sasha, to see a condo up in the Bayview Village area.

Sasha and I had been looking for about three months, but she couldn’t find the “right” property.  In actual fact, she didn’t know what the “right” property was, but she knew she would know it as soon as she set foot in it!

She wanted a lot of space, all new and upgraded finishes, and she didn’t want to pay a lot for it.  It was certainly no tall order…

We took one step inside a unit in the Bayview Village area and Sasha knew this was the place.

A 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom unit of 850 square feet for $329,900, and the building was only three years old.

The price had just been reduced about a week earlier from $339,900, and there was definitely action on the property since another agent came to show it when we were there.

The seller happened to be a Realtor, and she wrote on the listing “No offers from December 12th to 20th as seller is overseas.”

I wasn’t going to let that get in our way!

We drafted an offer for $315,000, and faxed it over to the listing brokerage.  I had the agent paged, and then sent her a PDF of the offer via email.  Seriously, in this day and age who doesn’t have a Blackberry even on vacation?

The next day at about 4:30AM, my phone rang….so I immediately reached over and slapped my alarm clock a few times.  The alarm clock wouldn’t turn off (stop ringing), and eventually I realized it was my phone….and it was the middle of the night.

It was the listing agent/seller calling from Romania where she was vacationing, and from the sounds of it, there was a conga-line happening around her as she yelled into the phone.

Her version of “negotiating” consisted of yelling numbers into the phone in barely decipherable English, but I really didn’t feel the need to negotiate at all.

In fact, I was completely committed to staying with our $315,000 offer price, come hell or high water.

The unit was vacant, albeit staged, and I figured that this agent/seller wanted to move the unit as soon as humanly possible.  She had rented furniture, a mortgage to pay, and monthly maintenance fees burning a hole in her pocket.

I gather that the unit was a rental-property for the first three years, and then when the tenant left, they renovated the unit (new hardwood flooring, paint, fixtures) and put it on the market.

It was Christmas time, the seller was on vacation, and she had an offer.

She WANTED to sell this condo!

We hung up after our first call since she said she didn’t want to deal with my offer until she came back, but she emailed me later that day to ask if my client would come up $10,000.  I knew we could strong-arm her, so I said “no” just as a reflex action.

She called me the next day, er…morning at about 5:00AM, and I promised her that if we got this deal done, I would personally buy her a new watch that tells time all over the world!

She begrudgingly accepted our offer since I gave her some racket about my buyer getting cold-feet this close to Christmas time.

My client got the condo for significantly under the asking price in a building where the five of the last eight sales have gone for over the asking price!

Would we have got this deal if it weren’t December 15th?  No.

Would we have got this deal if the agent weren’t on vacation in Romania in a limbo contest?  No.

Faced with the decision of leaving the unit vacant for another month through Christmas and New Years, the seller decided to sell.

Faced with the nuisance of working on a deal while on vacation, the seller moved quickly and took our offer.

The sale happened because of the time of year, and because my buyer was just as actively looking in mid-December as she was when the market was full-steam-ahead in September or October.

I cringe when I hear my buyers say “we’re not really interested in looking at properties over the holidays, but please get in touch with us in the New Year!”

That’s what the masses are doing.

The “average” home-buyer is also going to relax over the holidays and get the motor running again in 2010, and in the process, those buyers are going to lose out on some potential deals.

There are eight more days until Christmas.

I plan on working every single one of them…