Please help me present ourselves as buyers!

[megafish]

Looking for opinions and admit I'm a bit clueless here.

Background is DH bought our current house just as we were getting together, so I've never been through buying a house. We've paid the mortgage off on our current place and depending on the price of next place we buy, we might have enough to buy our next property mortgage free.

We are looking for a detached house with a reasonably sized south or south west facing garden in a relatively small area. Over the last year only 2 potential properties have come onto the market.

The estate agent asked us about our position, I naively said we have a property to sell and were not currently on the market. This led to one of the vendors refusing to let us view the house. My DH thinks that it's the fault of the vendor of cutting down the potential market, but I'm concerned this might be more of a problem if vendors do not see us as proceedable and we'll be stuck in this house forever.

Should I be presenting our circumstances differently if a potential house comes up? It's possible we could get a mortgage and pay it off once our current house sells. Moving into private rented is not an option we are prepared to do.

Any advice on how best to present ourselves so if something does come up we have a chance to see/offer on it.

Just to warn you with buying a new house before your previous one has sold. I recently did just that and only noticed two weeks before completion (lawyers should have pointed it out) that there was a clause in my mortgage that stated my previous mortgage had to be redeemed before this mortgage was taken out). The properties weren't chained so we assumed it would be fine but it wasn't. Was a mad scramble to beg family members to lend us enough funds to pay off my previous mortgage - it was incredibly stressful and we thought we'd have to default on completion and lose a fortune.

Also don't forget to budget for the extra 3% in stamp duty (you can claim it back if you go on to sell your previous home within 2 years). and paying for the running of two properties.

@Bells3032 we've redeemed our mortgage so that shouldn't be a problem as we will only end up with a single mortgage, but you are right about stamp duty and running two properties.

To those who asked we are aware we'd have to pay for a more expensive mortgage without redemption penalties.

If we do end up changing our mind and putting ourselves on the market, it won't be until the market picks up again. It wouldn't be our preference but it is something to think about.

Then your chain free which is very presentable to buyers.

We have recently sold our (SSTC)house. I told the Estate Agent, that we would not have anyone view, unless they were SSTC. We are selling a large 5 bed detached house, properties like mine are in high demand (south east). I always went to a lot of effort for viewings, I wasn’t prepared to do that for anyone that wasn’t in a position to purchase. Likewise, I didn’t view any properties until we were SSTC. If you can prove, that you could move without selling, that would be different. That is exactly what we did when we brought our house, as we had very young children and I wanted to avoid the stress of buying & selling at the same time.

We were is your situation, OP. Our cottage flat had been paid off. We arranged a mortgage in principle ready, so when we found the house we wanted to buy we could put an offer and we could proceed right away, as we weren't in a chain. A few months later we managed to sell the flat and recouped the additional stamp duty costs (we got 18 months to sell the place, but we are in Scotland, I am not sure how things are in England). But we definitely needed the MIP to prove that we could afford to buy the house without having to sell the other place (but we always made clear that we were not planning to keep the flat, it went on the market as soon as it was ready for it)