Looking to Move But Need to Sell First?

It seems this is an issue that I’m hearing more and more in the last year. Why is it problematic and how do we solve this? Well it’s a fair question and let me offer some suggestions and insight:

If you are looking to move, I recommend a few preliminary steps that may save you time, clarify your buying power,  and help you to make more educated decisions about how questions like: a) how long it may take to sell, what can I get for my home, can I afford what I want, etc?

1. Talk to a mortgage or loan representative.

I highly recommend this as the first step. Often times I have clients that assume they can qualify for a specific loan amount and actually want to make offers on a property prior to meeting with a lender. They incorrectly assume this is a simple process of no real significance until an offer is accepted. That thought process can cost you a lot of time and money.

If you know at the outset that obtaining a loan is necessary why not meet with a professional lender and bring to them all necessary paperwork at the outset? The benefits to you as a purchaser are:

• You will verify whether you have any credit issues
• You will know the maximum loan amount that you qualify for
• You can obtain a written pre-qualification letter from your lender- by the way this is a requirement when making an offer on any property. It’s not unusual for some listing agents and sellers to make such a letter a requirement of your offer. Offers submitted without such a verification are not taken seriously and can sometimes simply not be considered at all (especially when multiple offers are submitted on the same home). Why wouldn’t you want the seller of a desired property to know you are well qualified to purchase?

2. Have a experienced, professional agent give you an evaluation of your property.

I put this step in second place for a reason. Over the years, I have saved my clients a lot of aggravation, money , and lost time on the market by preventing them from exposing their home to the market place before it was in salable condition. We even offer a salability checklist to our clients so they can know what to expect when they are ready to sell.  Here are a few other items we offer our clients:

• The Five Factors that Sell Your Home- a written check list
• “Words of Wisdom: Advice for Sellers” items we have learned over the past 36 years
• Pre-listing inspections – how to avoid discovering defects in your home after an offer is made and prevent costly negotiations of repairs

3. Have an accurate evaluation of your home’s value prior to listing

4. Avoid purchasing PRIOR to selling

I can think of no greater path to spending the most money on both sides of the transaction! Let’s face it, the only way you can entice a seller of an existing home to wait for you to sell your home is to offer list price for that property. In order to abide by contract rules, you will need to establish a closing deadline or date on that offer. Guess what will happen to the asking price on your home once that deadline begins to get closer and closer? Exactly right, you will begin to dramatically lower your price. So essentially you pay top dollar for the home you are purchasing and you set yourself up for having to accept a lower price than you desired on the home you sell.

5. Lets Talk!

Let’s discuss how we can make a transition once you have an acceptable offer on your home. There are a number of strategies here and we need to discuss which options are the most favorable to you. Give us a call at 702-595-5688 or  702-858-2259.