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Sometimes, a quick sale is not what you want.
Important point
- My husband and I got an offer on our starter home right after we put it on the market.
- While that should have been a good thing in theory, it caused us problems in the end.
- We were left without a house to live in until we built one, which took longer than expected.
For the first few years of our marriage, my husband and I lived in what we called our starting house. In fact, he bought his house himself and welcomed me into it. But we soon realized that we might not stay in that house for long. It was on the small side and didn’t have much storage space. And since we were planning to have children, we knew we wanted a lot of space.
Our first goal is to list our house after getting a new house. But the 2008 housing market crash happened, and we were scared.
We decided to list our house in early 2009, before housing prices started to drop. Since buyer demand wasn’t very high at the time, we thought we’d get the ball rolling with a listing and start looking for a replacement home at the same time.
But surprisingly, we got a nice offer on our house the day the market went up. And while that was a good thing in theory, it ended up being a problem.
After selling your house you have nowhere to go
The offer we got on our starter home was a good one given the state of the market. And we stood to make a handsome profit in that house. So we accepted that offer knowing that it would only be a few months before we could find another place to live.
From then on, we continued our search, only to find that we were nowhere to be found. But, we stumbled upon a shopping opportunity new construction in the same neighborhood.
We jumped at that opportunity, especially since the builder recently lowered his price due to the state of the housing market and the fact that he is struggling to find a buyer. And although we know that a new building will leave us at a higher level mortgage loanwe also thought it was worth paying more each month to have a clean house that we could design ourselves.
Meanwhile, our clients have been very kind and agreed to move our closing date up a few months to allow more time for our new home to be completed. Only our builder’s estimate was off.
Instead of having our house ready for occupancy in June of 2009, our construction took almost six months longer than expected to complete the work. Since we had to leave our home starting in June, we were forced to secure temporary housing in the fall – not an easy thing to do when you don’t know how many months of housing you’ll need and I also have a dog.
But the bigger issue is, the truth is, even though we would love to buy a new home, we felt pressured because we have a buyer for our starter home and need to buy a new one. new house. If we hadn’t been so pressured, we probably would have done a better job of investigating our builder (who seemed very unprofessional and shady in many cases). Or, we could have hunted down a whole other house.
The lesson learned
My wife and I knew exactly why we wanted to rent our house when we did. And while we thought it would take months to sell, it only took hours. But what we have to do is wait until we think of a replacement house before putting that list.
In a down market, that’s what we’ve been buying in, it’s often possible to make an offer to buy a home based on your current home price. That would have been a better way for us.
Of course, you can’t get away with doing that in the case of new construction. But that does not mean that we have given our hearts to a newly built house. Instead, it was the first opportunity to buy that came along.
Of course, in a seller’s market, it is much more difficult to get an offer on an accepted home with a home sale attached to it. Maybe that strategy will not work today. But this is one that we had to use at that time to save ourselves from all the troubles.