How to Buy & Sell at the Same Time

If you need to buy and sell a house at the same time, what’s the trick to making both transactions go as smoothly as possible? Here are my tips.

Do you need to buy and sell a house at the same time? For example, if you’re looking to sell your home and you fall in love with a house that you want to make an offer on, you can’t do so until you show the sellers of your dream home that your current house is on the market and will sell soon. Your offer needs to be able to compete with other, non-contingent buyers in the market.

This is a real estate catch-22—you can either go ahead and buy the new home and just own two at the same time, or you can sell your home before you buy a new one, which would leave you temporarily homeless. So how do we avoid this conundrum?

Our team’s answer to this problem is a contingency sale.

First, we’ll help you prepare your current home to sell on the market. Once we do that, we can begin searching for homes. This is just the first step in the process, so we won’t write any offers until your current home is ready to go; we have to knock down this domino to get the process going.

 Your offer needs to be able to compete with other, non-contingent buyers.

If you have to use the proceeds from your home sale to buy a new home, we’ll sit down to figure out what your home is worth and what it could sell for on the market, walk you through our 150-step marketing plan, and the show you how we can get multiple offers on it within one or two weeks of listing. That way, you can write a really strong offer on the home you want to buy, even though it’s a contingent sale since you’ll quickly receive offers on it.

After listing, you’ll sit down with one of our buyer specialists to figure out what exactly you’re looking for in a home. When we’ve staked down your wants and needs, we’ll find three to five homes that match the criteria you’re looking for instead of combing through the entire market—we don’t want it to take several months for you to find the right home!

On the other side of the coin, when you’re writing an offer on the home you want to buy, we’ll make that offer contingent, as well—that way, you won’t end up owning two homes at once without having sold your current home first.

To help our clients buy and sell a home at the same time, we use a collaborative process with a listing specialist to help you sell your home and a buyer specialist to help you buy a new one. We’ll keep an open line of communication with you for the entire process and make sure to dot all the i’s and cross the t’s so you have a smooth, efficient process.

If you have any questions about buying and/or selling a home, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We’d be happy to help you!