There are many periods during the year when the date on the calendar affects real estate activities. For example, you can be sure that the slowest week of the year is between the end of summer camp and the start of the school year as most families don’t have the bandwidth to search for homes and handle endless days with no camp, no school and a home full of kids. Family obligations quite understandably put a damper on most buyers’ and sellers’ abilities to engage in the selling and buying of real estate during these weeks.
Of course, any major Jewish or national holiday always brings disruptions to the ebb and flow of the market. It’s hard to show a house when your kitchen is in the midst of transforming into a “chametz free” zone and equally challenging to coordinate between buyers and sellers on Thanksgiving day.
And yet all of these are simply challenges to overcome. If, as often becomes the case, there is a buyer and a seller who are both willing to make a showing happen on Erev Yom Kippur, well then, who am I as a Realtor to stand in the way? We will make it happen!
There is one period, however, that is different. One period where the slowdown in the market is not a result of some outside factor but one where the very nature of the time period requires us to refrain from the business of such large, life changing transactions.
It behooves us to review part of a paragraph recently sent out from Congregation Bnai Yeshurun about the nature of sales during the Three Weeks. During the Nine Days, unnecessary transactions should be avoided entirely, even on items that do not require Shehecheyanu. One may purchase an item that is on sale if it won’t be available at that price after Tisha B’Av.
Anyone who deals with the Jewish community in a real estate capacity is familiar with the Ninth of Av closing delay. Title companies, mortgage brokers and banks, lawyers and Realtors—and especially moving companies—all sit around and wait until this auspicious day has been completed so that deals which have been in the works for weeks and months may finally close.
I have often believed that the Jewish calendar asks us to feel and experience everything. The joy of Sukkot, the awe of Yom Kippur, the abandon/embrace of Purim and now, confronting the loss and ultimate sadness of the Three Weeks.
The Three Weeks period has always been a conflicting time. While I am working to bring families and clients comfort and security by helping them find the warm embrace that only a home is able to give, it is also a time of remembering destruction and loss.
To many, it may actually feel like this whole year has been one elongated Three Weeks period of sadness and abandonment. If I am asked to look deeply and honestly at what I have been seeing, the tones of my showings and closings have been different since October 7. There is a recognition that even this most rock solid and fundamental aspect of being a part of a Jewish community that comes with buying a home and becoming part of a new school or a new shul, has changed in some kind of fundamental way.
And so even if the “show must go on” prevails, as it should, and we all go back to our regular lives, the feelings we are mandated to feel during the Three Weeks come a bit more naturally to us this year.
Nechama Polak is the broker of record and owner of V&N Group LLC located at 1401 Palisade Avenue in Teaneck, New Jersey. Send your thoughts and comments to [email protected] or call 201 826 8809.
