Stepping Stones to Optimize Selling to Buy
In the preparations to sell your home and move up to a bigger or better home, downsize to a more compact or practical home, or just move to a new area there are many things to consider. Everyone wants to get the most out their home sale and likewise everyone wants to get the best deal possible buying their new home.
Lets add a layer of difficulty most seller-buyers run into. You need the proceeds from your home sale in order to buy the new home. This creates sale terms that require your buyer to be patient, and on the buying side offers with a home-sale contingency on the new one. These are tough terms for your buyer to accept and remarkably weak offers on your buying side in a healthy or strong real estate market. A home sale contingency is a large risk factor for the seller of your new home and they will put any home-sale contingent offers at the bottom of the pile of offers. This is hardly the best way to optimize your buy-side process, if anything it nearly cripples it.
Now, if you have a home-sale contingency you are pretty much the weakest offer in the pile, but if you have a large down payment and nothing to sell you suddenly rise toward the top of the offer pile. How can you flip your home sale requirement into an advantage? Simple, sell the home first. Now you’ve got all the equity you’ve built up in your current home ready to use as a healthy down payment making an attractive offer. But where will you live between selling your current home and buying your new home???
That’s one of the most practical and effective questions in optimizing your selling-to-buy process. Finding interim housing, a short-term rental or maybe a family member with enough space to put you up for a few months, can very well be the catalyst to turning a situation stacked against you getting the best of both worlds into enabling you to do just that. Work with your real estate agent to find interim housing early in your preparations to sell your home and the inconvenience you endure in moving twice will be rewarded with stronger market positions both in selling your home AND in buying your new one.
