How to Sell and Buy a Home at the Same Time
A good real estate agent knows how to buy and sell houses at the same time, but it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. In a perfect world, buying and selling homes anytime you wanted would be easy. There would be no need to eliminate contingencies or wait for the right offer to appear. But in the competitive real estate market, the seasons always change, making it essential to act with finesse. Sometimes, dramatic changes can happen within weeks, and then conditions can be the same for months.
Each change prompts real estate agents to adjust their strategies to guide their clients. If you need to buy and sell a home simultaneously, timing both transactions just right can be a challenge. Although it is a common practice due to necessity, buying and selling at the same time is definitely a higher risk transaction.
Thankfully, Marketplace Homes offers solutions that make buying and selling a home at the same time much easier – especially if you are interested in building a new home. What are they, and how can you buy and sell houses at the same time with confidence?
Buying and Selling a Home at the Same Time
Suppose you enter a typical real estate brokerage with a common need: selling your existing home while buying a new one. A real estate agent would need to figure out how to time buying and selling a house to your benefit. They would put your home on the market, promote it, and hope to get offers quickly. At the same time, they would show you homes and submit offers upon your request. If everything goes well, you can close on the new home after selling the first home, using the proceeds of the sale to pay the down payment (or pay cash). Most buyers need to use equity to buy their next home, so this timing is crucial.
However, transactions with home sale contingencies only succeed when everything goes right. If just one side of the transaction falls apart, you may have to start over.
For example, you may have your first home under contract, but then three weeks in, your buyer’s financing falls through because they bought a car and messed up their credit score. Without a buyer, you can’t close on your first home, so you have to wait for another offer and reset the clock, which means another round of inspections and appraisal.
Though you can sometimes save the deal by asking the seller of your dream home for an extended closing, this request can be denied.
This is why agents advise all sellers to eliminate as many contingencies as possible, whether it’s financing, the sale of your first home, or other addendums that can make the contract more complicated. But how do you do it?
The Quest for a Clean Contract
In a highly competitive seller’s market, an offer with a home sale contingency will get passed over for an all-cash offer or a “cleaner” contract. To make your offer more competitive, take one side of the transaction out of the equation to remove a sale contingency.
If you are in a position to tap into your equity and buy a house first, then you can take out a HELOC. This is a second trust that you must pay off. Thankfully, proceeds from a home sale typically pay off a HELOC. Note that as long as you own the first home, you must pay your former mortgage, HELOC payment, along with your new home’s mortgage.
Since the typical homeowner usually doesn’t have enough cash to close without using equity, selling first is often the only standard way. What if we told you that you can still use the proceeds from your first home for a new one if you have the right connections? The key is to work with a full-service real estate brokerage that offers special incentive programs to eliminate sale contingencies.
Creative Solutions to Eliminate Contingencies
When you need to buy and sell houses at the same time, even experienced real estate agents can’t control everything, especially when a whole other side of the transaction is usually in the hands of another agent.
This is why to maximize your success; you need to get help from a full-service brokerage that can remove any possible roadblocks. Don’t let a buyer’s bad decision to open a new credit card have you miss out on your dream home. At Marketplace Homes, we offer creative solutions that are difficult to find anywhere else. Here are some of the special programs we offer our clients:
- Guaranteed Buyout – When homeowners don’t want to gamble with coordinating the sale of their home with the purchase of a new home, they can buy a new construction from one of our top builders. Then, we will purchase the existing home so the buyer can close the new build the same day.
- Sell and Stay – We’ll buy your home and allow you to rent it back from us. This convenient program frees your equity without a HELOC payment and gives you the ability to make fast offers. You don’t have to move twice either.
As you can see, our strong relationships with industry-leading builders enables us to offer our clients unique deals that ordinary brokerages can’t. We don’t just help owners of single properties either, but we are experts at helping landlords release multiple properties and turn them into cash that they can use to buy more investments.
Buy and Sell Properties with Marketplace Homes
Buying and selling houses at the same time doesn’t have to be a stressful process. Hand this task to the experts. Contact Marketplace Homes today to learn more about our special incentive programs that help our valued buyers eliminate contingencies so they can move on and live their life.
Alicia Persson is a Content Strategist SEO writer at Marketplace Homes, utilizing previous years of experience on real estate teams that specialized in investments and property management. Before she joined Marketplace Homes, she was also a freelance writer for 7 years, leading to a specialization in real estate and home living content for boutique digital marketing agencies. During her writing years, she learned the basics of SEO and gained experience writing for many different clients, making her versatile at creating diverse content.
She is a proud University of Virginia master’s graduate and enjoyed her undergraduate years at the University of Mary Washington. When Alicia is not writing, she plays keytar and sings in a local 90’s rock cover band, or she spends time with her amazing family.