The most common first sentence I hear is some version of "we are thinking about maybe moving next year." It is usually said apologetically, as if it were too early to be talking. It is not. It is the best time.
What the timelines look like
The National Association of REALTORS surveys buyers and sellers every year. In the 2025 profile, the typical buyer searched for ten weeks before going under contract. The typical seller had lived in the home for eleven years, a record. On the corridor, once a home is listed, it goes under contract in twelve days in Westfield, thirteen in Carmel, and about a month in the slowest market we serve.
Read those together and the shape of a move is clear. The part everyone plans for, the listing and the search, takes weeks. The part nobody plans for, the eleven years of deferred decisions that a house accumulates, takes months to unwind. That is where the time goes, and it is why the calendar should start well before the sign.
Sellers: six to twelve months
A house that has been lived in for a decade has a list. Some of it is repair, some of it is presentation, and some of it is paperwork: the survey, the permits for the deck, the warranty on the roof. Six months is enough to work the list in the right order, which is the order that returns the most money, not the order that bothers you most. A year is enough to time the listing to the market and to your life instead of to a deadline. The earlier the conversation, the more of the list becomes optional.
Buyers: three to six months, longer if relocating
The ten-week search is the visible part. Before it: financing, which in the current rate environment deserves real comparison rather than a single pre-approval; a clear picture of what the household actually needs, which is rarely what the first search filter says; and, for anyone moving from out of state, the corridor sorting that the Areas We Serve page describes. A relocating family that starts three months out spends its house-hunting trip looking at the right towns. One that starts three weeks out spends it driving.
The undecided: now
The most valuable conversation is the one with a household that does not know whether it should move at all. That is not a sales call; it is the question the Symbio Index was built to answer, and it works best with time on the clock. A household that has decided and a household that is deciding are two different clients, and the second one has more options.
Why early costs nothing
An early conversation commits you to nothing. What it does is convert a vague intention into a sequence with dates, and it lets the market timing, the repair budget and the family calendar be arranged instead of collided with. In the 2025 profile, 91 percent of sellers used an agent and only 5 percent sold on their own, the lowest share ever recorded. The people who do this often have learned that the value is not at the closing table. It is in the year before it.
Sources: National Association of REALTORS, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers; Indiana Association of REALTORS Housing Hub, July 2026, township figures for the nine corridor communities. All read at source, September 2026.