Selling in winter: should your house have Christmas lights up?

The short answer

You can leave Christmas lights up while your house is on the market. We have no data that lights help a house sell, but a simple, fully lit display looks cared for at five o'clock on a December evening, and a half-lit roofline with a dead run over the garage does not. Whether lights suit your listing is your agent's call.

If you do decorate, keep it restrained: one warm white line along the roofline, every bulb lit, nothing flashing and nothing sagging.

There are really two questions here. Whether to decorate, and how much, is a listing question, so your agent gets the final word on photos and showings. Whether to buy permanent lights before you sell is a money question, and our answer is usually no. If you may move within a year, a seasonal lease is the better fit, and we will tell you that when you ask for a quote.

If you are listing between November and January, this is the order we would work in:

1. Talk to your agent first. Find out when the exterior photos will be taken and whether a dusk shot is part of the plan.
2. Keep the design plain. Warm white on the roofline, with a lit wreath or garland at the door at most.
3. Hang it before the photographer comes. Then keep every run working for as long as the house is listed.
4. Tell your agent the display is leased. We own the lights and remove them in January, so if you close in December, make sure your agent and the buyer's side know a takedown visit is coming.

Dusk photos and short December days

Listing photos carry a lot of weight. In the National Association of Realtors 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers, 81 percent of buyers who searched online rated photos as very useful, ahead of every other website feature. In winter, the exterior shot is where lights either help or get in the way.

Some listings use a dusk exterior: the sky still deep blue, the windows glowing, the house outlined against it. Ask your agent whether one is planned. If it is, on a Michigan December afternoon that window is short and early. Here is what the U.S. Naval Observatory tables show for Detroit this season, in Eastern Standard Time:

Two things follow from that table. First, the best light for a dusk photo in mid-December lands roughly between 5:00 and 5:30 pm, so your lights need to be on by then, not at seven. Second, the day is only a little over nine hours long around the solstice. Any showing booked after work happens after dark, so a buyer who tours on a weeknight sees the house by night.

There is one catch worth raising with your agent. A holiday exterior photo can date the listing. If the house is still for sale in February, a roofline in Christmas lights may signal how long it has been on the market. Ask whether the photographer should shoot a plain exterior as well, so the photo can be swapped after the holidays.

Warm white over full color

For a listing, the lights have one job: show off the house. Warm white does that. It traces the eaves and gables the way an architect would draw them, and it flatters the red brick, tan brick and stone fronts that line so many streets across Macomb and Oakland County.

Heavy color works against you in a photo. A roofline of red, green and blue bulbs tints the siding, pulls the eye away from the architecture, and says Christmas far more loudly than it says home. Our guide to warm white vs cool white roofline lights explains why the warmer white suits most brick and wood fronts, and when a cooler white is the better match for gray siding.

Here is how we would edit a display for a house on the market:

• Keep: warm white on the main eaves and front gables, and a lit wreath or garland at the front door.
• Keep steady: no twinkle, no chase. Motion reads as an event, and a still photo cannot show it anyway.
• Put away: inflatables, projectors and lawn figures. They crowd the front yard in the photo and hide the landscaping.

Showings and open houses

NAR's 2025 profile found that 43 percent of buyers rated open houses very useful. In December, any showing booked after about 5 pm starts in the dark, so what a buyer sees walking up the drive at 5:45 pm is part of the tour.

• Every bulb lit. One dead section over the garage can look like deferred maintenance, which is not the impression you want at a showing. Walk the front of the house at dusk every few days and look for gaps.
• On before the first evening showing. The timer should start at dusk and run past the latest showing your agent expects. On a leased display, tell us that time and we set it.
• Clear paths. Keep any cords you own off the walkway and the front steps, and keep the walk shoveled and salted. The lights are only as welcoming as the path to the door.
• Tell your agent how it works. If the lights are on a timer or an app, make sure your agent knows the schedule, so nobody is fumbling for a switch on the porch with buyers watching.

Why a lease suits a seller

A seasonal lease fits a house on the market almost exactly. We own the commercial-grade C9 LEDs, design the display, custom-cut each run to your roofline and hang it in November. It can hang dark until you want it on, and timers run it from dusk to the time you pick. In January we take everything down and store it.

For a seller, three parts of that matter most:

1. Nothing to pack. If moving day lands in January, you are not on a ladder pulling clips off the eaves between box runs. Our crew takes the display down, and it goes into our storage, not your moving truck.
2. No marks left behind. The runs hang on clips that keep shingles and gutters safe, never staples or nails, so a buyer finds no holes in the trim.
3. Outages are ours to fix. If a run goes dark the week of a showing, you call us instead of climbing a ladder in the snow.

Pricing is $18–32 per foot per season. No season is billed below $595. Smaller two-stories in Macomb Township usually run 100–150 ft of front roofline, and a 100 ft front lands at $1,800–$3,200 for the season. The full sequence from design to storage is in how a Christmas light lease works. November dates go in the order people call, so if the listing is planned for the holidays, book early and mention your listing timeline when you do.

Should you install permanent before selling

Usually not. Permanent roofline lighting is a fixture you pay for once, at $22–34 per lit foot, and it earns its keep over years of holidays, game nights and ordinary evenings in warm white. Put it on a house you are about to sell and you pay for all those years while using one season of them.

For scale, Troy colonials usually carry 120–180 ft of front roofline. For one December, the two columns are not far apart. The difference is what you are left with. The lease leaves nothing on the house. The permanent system stays on the trim for the next owner, and we cannot tell you whether a buyer in your neighborhood will value it or ignore it. Your agent is better placed to judge that than we are.

There is a timing problem too. Permanent systems go in during an autumn visit, and install dates are booked first come, first served. Fitting that into the weeks you are staging and photographing is a lot for a house you are leaving.

If your sale is a few years off rather than a few months, the math changes, and the five-year price comparison shows how the lease column adds up over time. Our guide to the downsides of permanent Christmas lights covers how we decide between the two.

Questions for your listing agent

NAR's 2025 highlights report that 91 percent of sellers sold with an agent's help. Your agent knows your market, your street and your photographer, so bring these questions to them before any lights go up:

1. When will the exterior photos be taken, and is a dusk shot part of the plan?
2. If the house is still listed after the holidays, will the holiday photo be replaced with a plain one?
3. Would you recommend lights on this house at all, and how much is too much for this street?
4. What time will evening showings and any December open houses run, so the schedule covers them?
5. If there are already permanent lights on the house, how should they be described in the listing, and what does the purchase agreement say about whether they stay?
6. Does the neighborhood association have any guidelines on holiday decor? If so, check its architectural guidelines before anything goes up.

Once you know the plan, measure your roofline from a street photo with the LightCast tool. Tap your garage door as the size reference, switch to the Seasonal C9 plan, and you will see a lease estimate for your roofline. The picture is processed right there in your browser, never uploaded, and we confirm the final price on site before anything is ordered. Happy with the number? Request a lease estimate with your listing date in the notes, and we will confirm within 24 hours.

Sources

1. U.S. Naval Observatory, sun and moon data for one day (Detroit) aa.usno.navy.mil
2. National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers (full report, copy hosted by Rhode Island Realtors) rirealtors.org
3. National Association of Realtors, 2025 Profile of Home Buyers and Sellers highlights nar.realtor