Selling two houses to buy one

[Gigitree]

Hi all,

Long story short, we are looking to sell our house and MIL’s house to then buy a bigger house with an annexe for MIL

We’re speaking to diff estate agents and I’m curious if anyone has any experience with this and can advise if they think selling through one estate agent for both houses or selling with diff estate agents would be better?

MIL’s house is in a very diff location, and completely different style of property with a fair amount of land with it, so we think a diff estate agent would be more suitable for her house than ours.
Just not sure if selling through two different agents is going to cause problems down the road/ cause any hiccups.

Anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks

Do you have the option to move in to one of the houses if the other sells quicker as that would help things go smoother

Thanks for replying.
No unfortunately as neither has enough room for all of us, hence the need to find somewhere bigger x

you will have a VERY complicated chain if you have to sell 2 properties (each potentially with a chain) to buy one. I'd recommend selling one house & moving that person into a rental if you can. then you'll have a massive deposit & be in a much stronger position to buy the new house.

We did, but weren't maxing out the mortgage on the resulting property, so made DHs house the one in the chain, and sold mine after we'd moved into the new house. We then paid a lump off the mortgage - this was all agreed with the bank.

But, the way house prices have gone since we did this, we probably couldn't do it now. Is there any way you could temporarily have 2 houses?

I'm actually doing this right now OP!!!

But I think we're doing it differently to you. We are selling DM's house first and buying the new property. Our house is about to go onto the market in the next few weeks. Bearing in mind our location/size/price we should sell very quickly and because our house is tiny it's likely to be a FTB with no chain.

The building work will begin based on DM's surplus - we're going to use the equity in our house to finish off the building work but it means a large chunk of it will already have been done by the time we move in.

I've also got two autistic DC and they don't cope well with change so this gives us the option to do it nice and slowly.

But to answer your question - I don't think it matters if you use different estate agents. I think it would be helpful to use the same one but not essential. It's more important to have the right estate agent who knows how to market your house so if that means different ones I think that's fine. I think using the same solicitor is more important than using the same estate agents.

Yes I agree, trying to get them sold so they both complete on the same day will be a nightmare. I’d use different agents but you need to push both sales ahead as quickly as possible and then whoever sells first goes into rental/ Airbnb (hopefully not for long).