DP and I selling two houses & buying one

[BESTAUNTB]

Hi. DP and I are moving in together. We’ll both be selling our houses.

I’m wondering about the logistics of chains etc with two houses to sell. We’re not going to be very desirable buyers with two to sell, we’ll be seen as complex I think.

I am considering suggesting both of us moving into rental and then buying, but it’s so expensive to rent now that it seems profligate. I’m just worried that mine will sell quickly and his won’t, and I’ll have nowhere to go. Similar if his house sells some time before mine.

I wouldn’t want DP and all his stuff (including dog) here in my small house when I’m trying to sell it so that’s not an great option. And vice versa. DP feels the same.

How have others done this?

It might not be impossible to set up a chain but from a seller’s pov high risk.

I’d pay to put stuff in storage and then cohabit while you sell the other house.

How much equity do you both have? If you have sufficient, it might be worth each of you getting a homeowner loan to give you the deposit on your new home, and letting your existing homes on a 6 month contract while you sell them? That way everything would be chain free and you would become appealing.

You need to sell within a specific time period to avoid additional stamp duty on your new home.

Alternatively, don't sell the old houses and keep renting them for your pension.

DP and I did this and it was fine.

Both our houses were offered on quite quickly and once we were ’under offer’ we started viewing properties to buy. The two properties didn’t seem to cause a problem.

In the end DP’s buyer asked to move in quicker than expected, we could have said no but it was easy enough to accommodate. He moved in with me for a month or so and we put his stuff in a big yellow storage until we’d completed on mine and ours.

Good luck!

Sell 1, live in the other. Then sell that 2 and buy in the usual way.

Are you SURE you're ready to live together?
Neither of you wants the other one to live in their current home.

If you weren't moving in together would either of you want to sell & move?

I haven't done this myself but I was unfortunately part of a chain where a mother and a daughter were selling their properties and buying one together. This meant that we had two parallel chains with two first time buyers at the end.

It was a complete and utterly nightmare. It just made everything so complicated and lengthy. It took so long that people's mortgage applications started expiring (which then created further delay as we had to wait for them to be renewed). We came within a whisker of our own mortgage offer expiring and as the general country's financial situation had changed in the interim, we would have been in a very difficult situation if it had expired.

If there's any way of breaking the chain and not going down this path, I'd definitely advise doing so!

Me and DH did this.

Our houses were opposite ends of the country. I Knew mine would sell within moments of it being on the market, and we knew DHs would be harder to sell.

We put both houses on together but then deliberately priced my house quite a bit higher than what it was worth. (Theory being if someone was happy to pay that we would say thank you very much) I was also already living in DHs house so getting rid if my home sooner wasnt a problem.

Once we had buyers for DHs house, we reduced mine to a more appropriate market rate price and sure enough it sold within a couple of days.

However we could NOT get all of our buyers and our seller to agree to the same completion date. (It was the sellers of our new house who were most awkward as they kept being out of the country for weeks at a time and only had very limited dates that they were prepared to complete on....... about 1 date every 6 weeks)..... and we had buyers who were not prepared to wait another 6 weeks........ so we ended up moving in with the in-laws for a couple of weeks (with all our stuff in storeage) and were techinially "homeless" for these couple of weeks, while we waited for a convienant date to complete on our new house.

There were times when it was quite stressful, but looking back it wasn't that bad really and well worth it to have 1 big house, rather than 2 small ones!

Thanks everyone.

We definitely want to move in together but don’t want to be squished into the other one’s current house which won’t help if we’re trying to sell it. We’re looking to move to a large house in a cheaper part of our county with our dogs and enough room for our adult children (5 between us) to visit. Currently we each have a small house and a large dog. We both have equity and will be mortgage free when we buy together.

We had two properties and decided to sell DH's first, and he was going to move in with me. We were very lucky, it didn't happen like that, he got an investment buyer who asked what he'd be doing and when they knew I might have a flat to sell, he wanted that as well.

Put both on the market and either move into a rental or in with eachother. You might be in the great position of having an offer on both of them and not having viewing if one of you has to move in with the other.

It can work selling both at the same time but I think a bit of luck is needed. We had 2 sales fall through as buyers couldn’t sort mortgages (nothing to do with our house.

We then accepted an offer from parents selling one house and the daughter selling another. We were the top of the chain and it all went through in 9.5 weeks start to finish.

It would be a lot easier to sell one first and then the other one.