How to go about selling our house. Which order would you do things in?

[petunia]

DH and I have done 2 part-exchanges with builders when it's come to moving in the last 13 years that we've been together. Our DD goes to a school 5 miles away (as an "out of catchment" child) but we'd like to in the next few years, move to the area. In the last few days, I've seen a house that I thought would be ideal for us in the catchment area. I know it's been up for sale for a while, but (typically now I've shown more than a passing interest!) now I see it's gone "under offer". But I've seen other houses that are quite nice and I'm wondering what to do next. It's not like we have to move, it isn't urgent. It's more a "it would be nice to" view, so I don't have the school run to do in the car etc. So I don't know whether to keep an eye on the market in the area (especially on this one that I liked in case it falls through) and even to send off for details/do visits, possibly find a house I like, and then put our house up for sale, or put our house on the market now and see how it goes before going off looking at houses.
What would you do?

You won't be treated seriously as a buyer until yours is at least on the market. Even if you find one you like it is very unlikely anyone would accept an offer until you were actually in a proceedable position and by the time yours has gone under offer that one may well have gone too. Similarly by the time you receive details in the post the better ones will have already sold, so register on Right Move to be emailed the details and decide whether to market yours or not. I was very pi$$ed off by casual viewers who made flaky excuses for dismissing ours when they were simply having a look around with little intention to move. Unless your property is so desirable and/or you can go for a price to sell quickly you need to put yours up for sale first.

Yes I agree with LIZS - it all depends how quick you think yours will sell too. We are on the verge of moving and were in a similar position - I saw the new house before we were on market - but we were really lucky and sold ours within a week of going on the market, and our vendor accepted our offer - he had three others but none of the others had offers on theirs.

Our Plan B if we lost that house was to sell this one and go into rented for 6 mth to a year - as there was nothing else on market that we liked ! Could you consider that option ?

Thanks for your responses. I think we've decided to stay put for the next 12 months or so. I think I've been getting a bit carried away with looking at houses on the internet. Part of me doesn't feel ready to move, just because it's the hassle of it and the effort of having to move all the stuff we've got. We'll perhaps get some valuations done, see how much we can borrow mortgage-wise and that'll give us time to have a clear out as well. Then we'll see how things are around this time next year.