Buying and Selling Simultaneously - What’s Your Strategy?

 
The real estate market continues to pick up at an incredible pace, and as a result, it’s a time of great change for homeowners.  You may have an old property to sell and a new property to buy.  While exciting opportunities lie on the horizon, tackling the dual challenge of buying and selling a home at the same time can be quite daunting.  What are your options?

There are a few common approaches to tackling this question, and which one works for you will depend about your specific situation and needs.  This is a time when an experienced real estate agent could be your most important advisor.  Make them earn their stripes!

Your options:

1. Make an offer on the new place and then sell your current home quickly, coordinating your sale closing in the morning and purchase closing in the afternoon of the same day.  This requires some good coordination between the parties, and an accommodating Title company.
2. As an augmentation to #1, make your offer on the new home contingent upon the sale of your current home.  In a competitive market, sellers aren’t always willing to accept an offer with a “home sale contingency”, but it is generally worth trying this approach first.
3. Consider short-term housing.  At present I’m working with homeowners whose home sold in just three days.  The purchase of their new home was a complex deal, and they knew they wanted to do extensive renovations before moving in.  They found a six- month rental to eliminate stress, and to allow for them to live in peace during the renovations on their new home. Of course, even shorter term rental options are generally also available.
4. Negotiate rent back.  Some other clients I’m currently working with needed to focus on selling their home before they could turn their attention to the purchase.  I generally advise my clients against extending their closing date out too far (8 weeks moThe  as it opens too manybopportunities for problems . raise. yers offered a rent back situation, wherein they’d purchase the home (the closing is today, actually), and will serve as landlords to the former owners (my clients) for a month, until their scheduled closing on their new home.  
5. Mortgage bridge loan.  In some cases, the best option is for the home owner to roll their current mortgage and a new mortgage on their home purchase into a single short-term loan called a “bridge loan”.  This is a temporary solution that offers the homeowner a reasonably sized monthly payment to cover both mortgages over a short period of time.  When the homeowner sells their first home, they perform a refinance into a new, more conventional style mortgage and pay off the balance on the bridge.  This approach can be daunting, and is often more costly than the other approaches, but sometimes provides the consumer with an option not otherwise available to them

If you have questions about these options, or about your real estate needs in general, please send me an email or give me a call.