Buying a new house / selling your house

[Turnsville]

My boyfriend and I recently had our house valued and we were both pleasantly surprised but shocked by how much it was valued at . We had three different estate agents value it and they were all saying roughly the same amount. On the strength of this we have been to see a few houses, basically for a nosey round and to see what we could get for our money. However we have totally fell for one of the houses and have been to see it again.

 

Our problem is: Do you have to sell your house before you can make an offer on another house, or do you put in your offer and if it's accepted then go about selling your house? If we couldn't sell our house for as much as it's been valued at, then we probably wouldn't be able to afford the new house: but is this something you deal with once an offer has been accepted and you're further down the line?

 

Someone will probably be able to tell me the answer straight away, but as we've never been in this position before, we're clueless.

 

Thanks

[babychickens]

My boyfriend and I recently had our house valued and we were both pleasantly surprised but shocked by how much it was valued at . We had three different estate agents value it and they were all saying roughly the same amount. On the strength of this we have been to see a few houses, basically for a nosey round and to see what we could get for our money. However we have totally fell for one of the houses and have been to see it again.

 

Our problem is: Do you have to sell your house before you can make an offer on another house, or do you put in your offer and if it's accepted then go about selling your house? If we couldn't sell our house for as much as it's been valued at, then we probably wouldn't be able to afford the new house: but is this something you deal with once an offer has been accepted and you're further down the line?

 

Someone will probably be able to tell me the answer straight away, but as we've never been in this position before, we're clueless.

 

Thanks

 

 

in an ideal world you'd have sold yours first, it makes it much much easier for you to get an offer accepted on one you want - the lower down teh chain you are, in general the easier it is for you to sell yours, so those higher up will often take several offers and accept the first one that sells theirs, so if you've sold yours already you're obviously at an advantage. i had hoped to do the same as you recently - we were moving within sheffield, and weren't prepared to move for the sake of it, we wanted something positively nice. nice houses, however, are always popular - we didn't get an offer accepted until we'd sold ours.

 

also, don't underestimate how long it'll take you to get yours ready to sell - clearing all your stuff away takes a long time, then filling and repainting any cracks, repainting any gloss that has yellowed, making the garden look good, cleaning everything ridiculously well, replacing missing numbers on the front door - it all takes time. if i were you i'd get busy preparing yours now - if you're not even on the market no-one would accept an offer from you. just make sure when you're showing people around that you make it clear that you're not in any hurry to move and won't just move due to pressure from them.

[Turnsville]

We did all the decorating, touching up paintwork up etc before we had the estate agents around. So we could let the agents know we are ready to sell and we're pretty much ready for viewings.

 

The house we are interested in is being sold by the children (I say children - they're probably in their 60's!) of a couple who have passed away. They said they are not in a great rush to sell the house, as the money is for them rather than for use on the purchase on another property, although they would like things sorted. They said if they received an offer from us and accepted it, they are in a position where they can wait, so I'm quite hopeful!

 

I think it's more that if we were to have an offer accepted, then we couldn't get enough for our house, for one we'd be really disappointed but we would've let them down aswell when they were prepared to wait for us. I suppose we wouldn't be the first or the last people it happened to though.