Selling rental property - advantages for moving?

cloo

So it looks like, only about two years late due to variousjob turbulence, we will be moving house in 2014.

We will be selling two properties; my former home, that’sbeen rented out for the last seven years, and our current flat. The plan is toput on my old house first and get that sale through or nearly completed beforewe market our current flat and start looking for our next place, to avoid thenightmare of conducting 3 transactions at once.
My old house will provide the majority of our deposit; it looks like I’ll have somewhere between 200-250k once the dust settles and costs, taxes etc paid off. I am wondering how we might take advantage of the fact we have a bit of a ‘headstart’ before we’ve moved out of our flat. One possibilitymight be purchasing at auction, and also, I presume, with the help of abridging loan, we could buy before we’ve sold our flat if we came across, say,a place that wanted a really quick sale.

So basically two questions:
- Any other advantages of having a good deposit amount before we need to move out of our current home?

- What are the pros and cons of bridging loans?Are they useful or should they be for emergencies only?

G_M

cloo wrote: »

...
So basically two questions:
- Any other advantages of having a good deposit amount before we need to move out of our current home?

- What are the pros and cons of bridging loans?Are they useful or should they be for emergencies only?

If you have enough to be abletobuy, before selling, then a) you have a good negotiating position (no linked sale) and b) it's a lot less hurried/stressful

Bridging loans are expensive. Back in the good old days, I bought a house entirely on 0% credit cards (I opened 8 of them if I recall!). Once purchase complete, tenant installed and rent coming in I paid off the cards with a mortgage. But nowadays getting significant cash like that at 0% might be a challenge!

cloo

Interesting approach! As you say, probably not a goer now.

I'm really not quite sure how to tell how much we'll have left to deposit from our flat sale; I'm guess the amount would be somewhere between £80-100k, so that might be about what we'd have to 'bridge' if it came to it.