Selling property with same agent as buying from?

[Mybabystolemysanity]

Looking for advice/experiences if anyone has put their house on the market with the same agent marketing the property you want to buy?

We are going to view a house we think we want to buy but we are not on the market yet (we're confident we'd sell quickly and don't want to sell until we have something we definitely want to buy so we don't end up homeless/renting). House we are looking at has been on the market two years with a couple of different agents.

We'd only be selling in order to buy that particular property and wondering about pros and cons of going to market with the selling agent.

Don't think the vendor is terribly motivated, so wondering if selling with the same agent might ease the process.

Or maybe it's a recipe for disaster? The agent is quite small and also a solicitor, so we think there might be a need to have a different solicitor for conveyancing to avoid conflict of interest. We're also not sure what their pool of interested buyers would be like.

All opinions gratefully received!

This worked really well for us.
We only wanted one specific house, and had our own house ready but not on the market.
The agent negotiated with the seller to give us one month to find a buyer for ours and agreed to take it off the market for this month if we agreed to pay the asking price. Which we did.
The agent was then highly motivated to find us a buyer, which he did.
All went like clockwork.

notthe this is exactly what I want to do with this one we're looking at. It's 10k under the home report valuation as it is and that's completely fair in terms of what we'd need to spend to make it ours. I'd like them to take it off the market for 4-6 weeks so we can get ours sold in exchange for asking price. DH, of course, thinks he can get more off. I despair sometimes, I really do. Always wants a country estate for flat money!

With regard to the legal side, my solicitor was separate from the EA and dealt with both my sale and purchase. My first offer was accepted and my buyers offered me the asking price, so I wasn’t ever in a haggling/adversarial position such as your DH might envisage. Just be aware of what reasonable pricing on both sale and purchase should be - obviously you don’t want to throw money away, but equally you don’t want to lose a house you really want for the sake of a few thousand pounds.

And Mosaic, my new home is a bungalow!

Oh lucky MrsFezziwig!

I did my own viewings too - unsurprisingly the estate agents thought that would work better . They lined up six sets of viewers for me on the same day an hour apart (they had said half an hour apart but I balked at this, which was just as well as even an hour apart one set overran). If I was a bit hesitant with the first couple I was an expert by the end of the day (if completely exhausted). I sold it though!