Do you currently own a home that you need to sell before you buy your next home? In this video, I show you how to seamlessly buy and sell a home at the same time. Because there are so many moving parts in this situation, it’s important to time your sale just right to avoid ending up homeless in between transactions.
Planning Your Transactions
Buying and selling at the same time can be really tricky. It requires a lot of planning, and if you don’t plan accordingly and act accordingly, you could be homeless in between transactions—which is not a good thing.
When you’re buying and selling a home at the same time, there’s a lot of moving parts that can be contingent upon each other. We’ll go through exactly how to navigate this type of transaction and keep you out of trouble. Timing the sale of your current house and the purchase of your next house is what’s most crucial in this process.
The first question you need to ask yourself is if you need to sell your current home before you buy your next home. If the answer is no, this just became a lot easier. If your answer is yes, then the situation is a little bit trickier.
The Right Timing
Ideally, you have an offer on your existing home before you make an offer on your next home. Let me explain how that works.
The reason this is important is that you will need to sell your current home and get rid of that debt before your lender will give you more money to buy your next home. In our dream world, we would sell our current home in the morning, and later that afternoon or the next day we would buy our new home.
There are a few reasons why you’ll want to line up your transaction this way. When you make an offer to purchase a home, that seller wants to know that your offer is not contingent on your need to sell something to buy their home. Let’s imagine that you’re the seller and I’m your agent for listing your home. We’re not going to accept an offer from a buyer who has to sell their home first to buy your home. That’s a contingent offer and is not a strong position. However, if they have an offer that is an executed, legitimate purchase agreement to buy their home, then that’s a whole different story.
How To Do It
Here’s the best way that we recommend doing this process. First, you can loosely start window shopping. As we get further on in the process where we’ve listed your home for sale and we have an accepted offer, then we start more aggressively looking. It’s important, as a buyer, to be prepared to write an offer and perform on it, specifically once you get an offer on your property or you are expecting one.
In a perfect world, it looks like this: we get an offer on your existing home, and then we make an offer on your next home—in that order. We want to line up those closing dates so that they can ideally be on the same day, concurrently, or within 24 hours of each other. This is exactly how you end up not being homeless in between two transactions.
Do You Need Help Buying And Selling?
In the past 15 years of my doing this, no two transactions have ever gone exactly the same. While they all have their different roadmaps, one of the most complex types of transactions anyone will ever do is to buy and sell at the same time.
I hope this helped to simplify and explain a little bit about how to buy and sell a home at the same time. Since everyone’s situation is different, feel free to reach out to me if you’d like any advice or help. Give me a call at (619) 925-2322, and I’ll be happy to connect with you!