To Not Know How To Align House Sale With Moving Into Rented Accomodation?

[Toomuchtooyoung01]

Our house is under offer but we are struggling to find a new home to move to. We have put offers in on several houses but have either been outbid as they have gone for thousands over the asking price or a cash buyer has swooped in. The market is really dry right now with not many decent properties about, or as mentioned they get snapped up really quickly for an extortionate price. We are likely to rent short term to wrap it all up and make sure our sale goes through while we continue looking for a new home to purchase.
The issue is this, how do we align completing on our property with renting?
Sorry if I sound thick but we can’t hand the keys over to someone without somewhere to move into, and we can’t sign a tenancy contract without completing in case the chain breaks down at the last minute.
Does anyone know how we make this work? Thanks!

It is unlikely your chain would break down after exchange, so if you separate exchange and completion you could take out a tenancy inbetween.

We were in exactly the same position- selling a house, and going into rented, and I just couldn't work out how to do it. We found a rented house we liked, and explained our situation, and the landlords were happy to have a void couple of weeks to get bits and pieces done in the property. We exchanged on the sale on 22/12, and completed 8/1. We got the keys to our rented house on 7/1 so we could move boxes of things the day before, then the removal men moved everything else as normal on the day of completion

We found that landlords were quite reasonable if you explained the situation.

You have to insist on at least two weeks between exchange and completion. It seems quite common to exchange and complete on the same day now, but that just doesn't work if you're moving into rented.

We were in that situation (a week before Christmas, with a baby and toddler 😩) and we had to threaten to pull out of the sale - we still only had a 3 day gap between exchange and completion and that was over a weekend!!

We waited till exchange was in sight then viewed a rental property, offered slightly over the asking rents price and put down the initial deposit of a week’s rent.

Once we’d exchanged and we had two or three weeks until completion (although buyers really pushed us for less) we signed the rental agreement and paid the full deposit and first months rent.

What is the availability of suitable rental property like in the area? Our purchase cell through at the very last minute but we went ahead with our sale as the purchasers had been very patient.
Instead of moving our furniture to a new property the company took it into storage and we found a rental and managed to rush through the contract in a few days.