Should I sell my house in 2026, or wait?

When someone asks me whether they should sell this year or wait, they're usually asking something narrower: will I get more money if I wait until spring.

I'm Jen Keene, a REALTOR® in Scottsdale, AZ helping long-time homeowners sell the family home and find the next one. I can't answer that question and neither can anyone else, and I'd be careful with anyone who says otherwise. What I can do is show you the numbers that exist now, explain what they mean for a house like yours, and give you the three questions that actually decide this. Two of the three have nothing to do with the market.

Let me start with where the market is, because everything else reads against it.

In August 2026, the most recent month ARMLS has published, Greater Phoenix held 23,406 active listings against 5,471 closed sales. That works out to 4.28 months of supply.

Months of supply is the most useful number in any market report and almost nobody explains it, so here it's. It answers one question: if no new homes came on the market starting today, how long would it take to sell everything currently for sale at the pace buyers are currently buying. Under roughly four months, sellers hold the leverage. Around four to six, neither side does. Over about six, buyers do.

At 4.28, the region is balanced. Not a seller's market, not a buyer's market. The middle.

Across Maricopa County in August 2026, the median asking price was $499,000, homes were spending a median of 67 days on market, and asking prices were down 4.95 percent against the same month a year earlier.

Two things those figures can't tell you. The ARMLS number covers all of Greater Phoenix rather than Scottsdale on its own, and Scottsdale runs consistently above the regional median. And the county median mixes every price band from a condo in the south to an estate in the north, so it describes the weather rather than telling you what to wear.

Regional supply, sales and inventory: ARMLS STAT report, ARMLS® COPYRIGHT 2026. County asking price, days on market and the year-over-year change: Realtor.com, via FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

A balanced market with asking prices slightly down and, in August 2026, a median of 67 days on market isn't a market that punishes a well-prepared seller. It's a market that punishes an unprepared one. That distinction is the whole thing.

In 2021, a house sold because it existed. Condition, preparation and pricing were nearly irrelevant, because there were more buyers than houses and the buyers had no alternatives. That market is gone and it isn't coming back on any timeline worth planning around.

In a market at August 2026's 4.28 months of supply, with homes taking two months to sell, the gap between a prepared home and an unprepared one is enormous. Two identical houses on the same street, one priced on comparable sales and presented properly and one priced on hope, don't produce slightly different outcomes. One sells in a normal number of days near asking, and the other sits, takes two price reductions, and eventually closes below where it would have if it had been priced correctly on day one.

So the first thing to understand about waiting is that it doesn't improve your position unless you use the time. Waiting six months and listing the same unprepared house into a market you can't forecast isn't a strategy. Waiting six months to replace a roof, clear the contents, fix the things an inspector will find anyway and go to market properly is a strategy, and it works regardless of which way the market moves.

1. What are you doing next, and does it depend on this sale?

This is the one that decides it most often, and it isn't a market question. If you're selling to buy something else, you're selling and buying in the same market. A higher price on your sale in a stronger market comes with a higher price on your purchase in that same stronger market, and the two largely cancel. If you're moving to something smaller, a rising market is mildly good for you, because you're selling the expensive asset and buying the cheaper one. If you're moving up, a rising market costs you money on balance.

If the sale funds a move you've already decided on, waiting for a better market isn't caution, it's delay with a story attached.

2. What does waiting cost you, in actual money?

Almost nobody prices this, and it's arithmetic anyone can do. For every month you wait you're paying the mortgage interest, the property taxes, the insurance, the utilities, the HOA dues and the maintenance on a house you've decided to leave. Add those up and put a real number on one month. Then multiply by six.

Now weigh that number against the price improvement you're hoping for. For a great many houses, six months of carrying costs is larger than any plausible gain from better timing. When it's, the calculation is finished and the market never came into it.

3. Is the house ready, and how long would it take to get it ready?

This is the only one of the three where waiting genuinely creates value. If the house needs a roof, if the kitchen is original and there's a sensible case for a targeted update, or if twenty-five years of contents need to be dealt with before anyone can photograph a room, then time spent is money made. That isn't waiting for the market. That's preparation, and it pays whatever the market does.

The contents are the one people underestimate. On a home somebody has lived in for two decades, sorting what goes and what doesn't is the thing that stalls a sale for months, and it's the reason I bring in a senior move company to walk the house room by room before it's listed rather than after.

I tell people to wait more often than they expect, so here are the cases where it's right.

• You haven't owned it for two years. The federal capital gains exclusion needs two of the last five years of ownership and residence. If you're a few months short, waiting those months out can be worth a great deal of money. How the exclusion works is worth reading before you decide.
• The house genuinely isn't ready and you have the time to get it ready. See question three.
• You don't know where you're going. Selling without a next move settled is how people end up buying the wrong house under time pressure. I'd rather spend two months touring what's available with you first, which is what I do anyway before a listing goes live.
• A life event makes the timing genuinely bad. A health matter, a family situation, a job that hasn't settled. The market will still be a market later.

And the case where waiting is usually wrong: you've decided to go, the house is in reasonable shape, and you're waiting because a headline made you nervous. That's the version that costs people money, and it costs it quietly, one month of carrying costs at a time.

Three things to work out, and not one of them is a forecast.

1. What the house is worth today, from comparable sales rather than an automated estimate. How I arrive at that number is deliberately transparent, because a seller who doesn't believe the number can't make a decision with it. I bring three prices to a listing appointment and let the seller choose.
2. What one month of waiting costs you, from your own figures.
3. What's between the house and being ready, and how long each item takes.

Put those three together and the answer usually decides itself without anybody predicting anything. That's the point. A decision that depends on a forecast is a decision nobody can make well, and this one doesn't have to depend on one.

If the move is out of a home you've been in for fifteen or twenty-five years, that sale has its own shape and I'd plan the sale and the purchase together rather than treating them as two transactions. If you want to know what your house is worth before you decide anything, start there.

Or send me the address and what you're thinking of doing next. Get in touch or call me on (480) 203-6605, and I'll tell you whether I think this year or next is better for your particular house. I've told people to wait before, and I've walked away from listings where the price the seller needed wasn't reachable. I'd rather say that at the appointment than after you've signed.