House sold but haven't found somewhere to buy...

GDB2222

You could go for exchange of contracts with a flexible completion (with a long-stop date in say 4-6 months time). That way you and your buyers have the certainty of a sale, you have the advantage of being effectively a cash buyer, and you have the disadvantage of having to move anyway once you reach the long-stop date.

barnaby-bear

GDB2222 wrote: »

You could go for exchange of contracts with a flexible completion (with a long-stop date in say 4-6 months time). That way you and your buyers have the certainty of a sale, you have the advantage of being effectively a cash buyer, and you have the disadvantage of having to move anyway once you reach the long-stop date.

Useless for the buyer - their mortgage offer will have run out by completion, so no certainty there. They'll be exposing themselves to house price falls and mortgage rate fluctuations.... plenty of desperate sellers out there - who in their right mind would go for such a deal tying themselves into all the financial risks....

ClaudiaC_3

needhelp1 wrote: »

... I really don't want to lose our current buyers as they are lovely people and they love the house. It would be terrible to do that to them...

That would partly be their choice given your current situation if they are ok to wait or if they decide to start looking elsewhere, so don't feel too guilty, the best you can do is to look after your own interests first and also keep your buyers up to date with as much honesty as possible.
We're not talking buying a pair of shoes here, if your buyers love the house and have already spent money on survey etc and they don't mind waiting still, then I think you should just carry on looking until something comes up, or looking to go in rented accomodation. Not sure why you need a 7% mortgage, get a free broker to look into it if you haven't yet.

We could have been in a very similar situation, we were looking at buying a bigger house semi-seriously beginning March, just to see what was on offer. We were thinking of keeping this house and renting it out, until we saw this rarely available house in an area where they don't come up for sale very often. We went to see it and knew we needed to sell our place quickly to be able to put an offer in. So went with same estate agents. The day after seeing the house our place was on the market.
1 week in we got the news that the house we wanted to buy had had an offer accepted. 7 days later we accepted an offer on our house and put in a higher offer on the house we wanted which was rejected.
at this point we didn't know what to do as we didn't really want to sell our house since we only wanted to move in to the one that had been lost, but we were promised by our estate agent that another one exactly the same, in the same road was coming up in the next few weeks.
And our buyers accepted to wait for that. They are also a young couple of FTB, who told us they went to see so many houses in the neighbourhood but this one was the only one they went to see twice and they really love it.
This was mid April!!!

2 weeks later we got a phonecall that the house we originally wanted was back in play and vendor asked the EA to get back to us to see if we still wanted it, we offered 6K less than our original offer and we got it.:beer:
6 weeks on and no news of the other house yet, so could have lost our buyers too ...!

mlz1413

Why oh why would anyone put their home up for sale when they have no where to move to and don't want to move into rented??

I ported a fixed rate a while back and was allowed upto 6 months maximum to re-start the mortgage before I lost the deal, had to pay the redemption but got that back on completion.

If that option is available to you I would put your stuff in storage and move into the cheapest rental you can find.

If that is not an option decide if you will move or won't - the buyers mortgage deal has to be completed in a few weeks time ie short of find somewhere by the weekend and rushing the mortgage valuation, searchs and solicitors you have no hope of making that time limit.

pawpurrs

To be fair its pretty pointless trying to find somewhere untill you have a buyer, as you are not in a postion to proceed. If you did find somewhere it could well sell before you sell yours. However, in this market, I wouldnt discount the significance of having a ready and willing buyer, and personally I would move out in to rented, rarther than risk losing them. Just because you found one buyer quickly, does not mean you will find another as easily, as I and others can verify.

johnson293

pawpurrs wrote: »

To be fair its pretty pointless trying to find somewhere untill you have a buyer, as you are not in a postion to proceed. If you did find somewhere it could well sell before you sell yours. However, in this market, I wouldnt discount the significance of having a ready and willing buyer, and personally I would move out in to rented, rarther than risk losing them. Just because you found one buyer quickly, does not mean you will find another as easily, as I and others can verify.

This is the situation we were in - put ours on the market, and didn't actively house hunt until we had definite interest in ours (to avoid seeing something we wanted but couldn't move for) - then once we accepted on ours, we started considering making offers ourselves.

However, our priority was to sell ours first, so if we hadn't been able to find anything to buy, we would have rented in the meantime. After all, once ours sold, it would put us in a better situation to buy anyway, without a property to sell.

GDB2222

barnaby-bear wrote: »

Useless for the buyer - their mortgage offer will have run out by completion, so no certainty there. They'll be exposing themselves to house price falls and mortgage rate fluctuations.... plenty of desperate sellers out there - who in their right mind would go for such a deal tying themselves into all the financial risks....

How long does a mortgage offer last? We had no problem in the past doing this (twice, actually).

poppysarah

sell and rent.