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ECUGirl2004
member
What's the right order of events when selling a home and buying a new one?
ECUGirl2004
member
We need to move this summer and we want to get our house on the market within the next month (the sooner the better). I know a lot of people here have bought/sold recently, so hopefully ya'll can give me some good advice. I know we need to do all of the following, I just don't know what the right order is... Here's how I imagine all that we need to do. Can you let me know if there's something important I'm forgetting? Or if we should shift our order around at all?
- Get our house as clean as possible, declutter, take care of minor repairs and touch-ups
- Interview realtors, do any staging they recommend, and get house listed, and wait for offers
- Check our credit reports/scores
- In the mean time, keep an eye out for houses we might be interested in
- When we get an offer, THEN start looking seriously at houses
- Talk to bank to get pre-approved for loan (I already did calcs to see what we can afford, so this will just be so that we can make an offer when we find a house)
- Make offer on house, pack, close, move, be happy. 
The main things I am uncertain about are how much we should look for a new house before ours has sold, when we need to talk to the bank, etc.
If you sold your house & bought a new one recently, did you stay with your old mortgage lender? I imagine we'd shop around, but I have been very happy with Wells Fargo for the past 5 years.
Any other wisdom from those who have BTDT recently?
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Re: What's the right order of events when selling a home and buying a new one?
I know your DH is a teacher, so have y'all thought about getting your mortgage through SECU? They usually have great rates.
Yeah, when we bought this house, we got better rates through Wells Fargo. NCSECU is a more conservative lender than WF, or something like that. Plus, when we bought our house, we did it solely on my credit b/c DH had some issues with his. When we buy our next house we'll have to determine if we get a better rate just using me or with our combined income/credit.
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I would probably start to look at houses as soon as your home goes on the market. We looked at 17 houses before we made an offer on one, so it's a fairly time consuming process. We hadn't looked at any houses when our house sold and that was really stressful because the buyers of our house wanted to close in just over 30 days.
I think decluttering and doing minor repairs before meeting with a realtor is a good idea. Since we had already completed all of that it made getting the house on the market much faster once we selected a realtor.
I think once you start looking at houses you should go ahead and get your pre-approval loan letter from the bank. That way you have it in the event you see a house you want to place a contingent offer on. We stayed with our current mortgage lender (State Employees Credit Union). They had much lower origination fees, no PMI, and they could close the loan in under 30 days which most large institutions can't do now because of all the new red tape surrounding mortgages.
If you have any more questions, feel free to shoot me an email or we could get together for lunch if you are out in RTP some time soon.
I think what you are planning looks great. But, I will say that we did things a little differently. We put earnest money down on a new home on a Thursday and had our old place on the market the following Monday. And, we were fine. We were lucky that our place sold within 10 days. But, it was in great shape, priced fairly and in a good part of Cary that was convenient to a lot of things. So, I think those factors contributed to our success.
Overall, it will just be up to you and your DH to determine how seriously you want to look at homes, but I don't think it will hurt to look a little more seriously right now.
Good luck!
I think your order is great, but if time allows, I think you could look at houses seriously as soon as possible. You never know how quick your house could sell, so I'd want to be aware of what's out there, what areas I'm interested in, and start narrowing things down right away. Plus, you might find the perfect house now...and they might accept a contingency - you never know in this market.
Also, about mortgage lenders, I'd def. check out several. Even though you like WF, I'd still go with whoever has the best rates/fees. It might be WF, but it could be someone else.
Very exciting - good luck with the whole process!
We bought less than 2 years ago and we started the financing process first, we sat down with an awesome mortgage broker who walked us through everything, and we got pre-approved on paper, knew exactly what we could spend so went we found the house it was just a matter of signing some paperwork to put the loan through. I would start casually looking at houses once yours is on the market, we looked from Jan-May before we found one we liked, and then that offer fell through so we had to start again. It would also be helpful to have your area/neighborhood of choice zoomed in on so you can monitor the houses there, we were so scattered it was hard to focus on what area we really wanted to live in.
We recently refinanced through Coastal Federal Credit Union and were very happy with their rates.
Thanks for all the advice everyone! We are already looking at new houses, but just online, and driving by on the weekends. We have several that we are very interested in, and we might try to go see them in a couple of weeks if they're still available. Luckily, we have a really good idea of where we want to be, so that helps a lot.
My main concern is that it will take our house a long time to sell, since we're in a rural area. 2 houses in our subdivision have been on the market for quite awhile. Luckily, I have no problem undercutting their prices if it'll help us sell our house faster.
And we have a nice cul-de-sac lot (with an Albino deer! ha!) so there are definite pluses to our house over our neighbors' houses. I guess we'll just see how it goes!
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I would definitely recommend going in some homes sooner rather than later. There were a lot of places that looked good online and on the initial drive-by, but once we got inside they were not anywhere close to what we were looking for.