The light improves, gardens wake up, and buyers often feel more motivated after the New Year. But timing your move purely around the season can be a costly oversimplification. The better question is this, will waiting improve your outcome, or simply delay your plans while the market moves around you?

Around this time each year, you will often hear talk of the so-called “Boxing Day Bounce”. The idea is that Boxing Day is the biggest day of the year for new property listings and online activity, with buyers flooding property portals in record numbers.

Even within the same town, property markets rarely move as one. Buyer behaviour varies by neighbourhood, price sensitivity changes street by street, and the pace of decision making can shift noticeably within a short distance.

As we enter the early months of 2026, the residential property market has moved into a noticeably different phase, following the volatility of recent years.