How to Buy a House While Selling Another
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There’s a question I get asked all the time – How to buy a house while selling another, can I put a contingent offer on a home? I’m going to share with you three ways that that can happen.
A contingent offer is a situation where your home that you wish to sell has not yet sold. You’re either somebody who
A – Hasn’t listed their home yet and you found your dream home.
B – Your home is on the market and you found your dream home and you wish to make an offer on it.
C– Your home is in a sale pending status and you want to write an offer on that next home.
In each of these situations, a contingent offer would be necessary. Situation one, where your home is not yet listed, would be a non-leveraged situation, meaning the seller has very few reasons to accept your offer as a contingency because you bring nothing to the table other than a dream and a wish.
In situation two, your home is listed but without an offer on it. Your home is not under contract, so you don’t have anything really solid to bring to that seller. A seller could accept your offer in either one of those situations because for them it’s all upside. They will continue to market their property until they find a buyer that is ready, able and willing to purchase it without a contingency, or until such time that you’ve removed the contingency by getting an offer on your home.
The third scenario is you have an offer on your home already. It’s under contract and in sale pending. In that situation, you can write an offer on that seller’s home with more confidence because you have more leverage and you have more of a firm position and an opportunity to give that seller what they want by simultaneously negotiating, because you’re in a much stronger position in situation number three.
There's a question I get asked all the time - How to buy a house while selling another.
In situations 1 and 2, where your home is just listed or not yet listed and you don’t have an offer yet, hire an agent that has the ability to negotiate for you, because this is going to take some strong negotiations to remove that seller’s home from the market. If you can get that seller to take their home off the market for a short period of time, (ie two weeks or three weeks) that’ll give you the time to get your home marketed and sold and you can move into that property and close on it and execute on that contract.
If your agent can’t get that home off the market, then you’re really sitting in a precarious position because you haven’t sold your home yet and that seller can continue to market it to other buyers that do not have a contingency.
There’s a couple of alternatives to contingent offer. Number one is a bridge loan, check with your lender on the ability to do a bridge loan. Number two is a guaranteed sale program. Not many real estate companies provide a guaranteed sale program. At Yoder Real Estate, we still do a guaranteed sale and we help sellers each and every year with our Guaranteed Sale program. If you want to know more about that, simply reach out to us.
If this video was helpful, please subscribe to it because we’re going to be doing more and more of this type of video this year as sellers are asking these types of questions, and you deserve to know the truth about how this works. Secondly, if you really enjoyed this and you know of someone else that would find value in it, please share it with your friends and family because this question is going to come up often this year, and we’ll continue to do this more and more.
If you have any questions or would like any real estate advice whatsoever, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us by phone or email. I’ll talk to you soon!
Thanks for suggesting that it would probably be better for me to hire an agent who can negotiate in my place. I’m afraid that I’ll be selling my house less for what it is actually worth and I don’t want to suffer from low profit after the deal has been signed. I’ll follow your advice and work with a realtor around Mendham, NJ, who can help me sell my property.