What if you accept an offer but nothing around

[Tblock1800]

We’re currently on the market selling our property and upgrading. Obviously we are not proceedable as of yet and there has been a few houses we have really liked that have been and gone. Say for arguments sake, we get an offer in a few weeks and there’s nothing really on the market that appeals, is it just a case of wait until the right properties come on the market? What if it takes months, wouldn’t your buyers get inpatient? Just wondering if anyone has experienced this where they sold their property, but it took them a while for other properties to come on the market they liked. Surely nobody wants to buy for the sake of buying for a quick sale. It’s got to be the right property.

It will depend on the chain below and above you and whether and for how long they’re prepared to wait. Some people are content to sell and rent until they find what they really want. We’ve twice moved into rented- once for three months and once for six.

Isn’t that throwing money away though? And don’t you have to rent with a contract? Not sure i could do that, but certainly would want the right property

You rent a place for a short period or move in with family. I don't see how renting is "throwing money away" - you have to live somewhere! If you're in Scotland there's no minimum contract for renting so you can stay as long as you need to, even if that's just a month or two.
And if there's no chain you're in a much better position when you do come to offer on a place.

Buying and selling is a game of luck really. Managing to sell your house and finding one you want to buy at a similar time.

We accepted an offer on our house earlier in the year. Unfortunately the house we had our eye had already sold by then, and there was nothing else we wanted.

Luckily our buyer loved our house and was prepared to wait for it. 2 months later an even better house came on the market and we bought that and are now living there.

If our buyer had got impatient and threatened to pull out, we would have quite happily said, fine, pull out then. We knew we could have got another buyer quite easily, and there was no way we would have given up our family home to go into rented, until we had found the new home we wanted.

@Tblock1800 we had a rental contract for six months and factored that into the general expenses.

For three months, we were able to ‘borrow’ a house from a friend who moved in with his girlfriend.

Totally agree. I just wouldn’t rent and personally see no benefit in going from putting money into a mortgage to paying some landlord for god knows how long even if it is temporary. I guess if it come to that moment, i would wait until the right house come along and if our buyers got inpatient and pulled out, would just accept that. Renting not an option for me.

You give up and stay in the house you’re in lol. That’s what we did anyway. The buyer stuck around for a few months and we put in countless offers on houses that sold for way, way more than the asking price. Well try to move again one day but probably not for a few years.

If you’re going from paying off a mortgage to paying some landlord for months, in my opinion that’s just not something i wouldn’t do. I would personally rather wait it out staying in my current home paying it off and wait for the right property. If our buyer really loves our property they will wait

I do know of someone who went into rented, supposedly temporarily and then the housing market shifted and they got stuck. Couldn’t afford to buy again as they were priced out of everything suitable.

Exactly this. Imagine not finding the right house for ages and you’re stuck in a renting rut. All that hard earned money that would have gone on your mortgage paying some landlords mortgage. Not for me personally.

I have known people to get to a point of near exchange and then wait months until the seller has found somewhere

not to mention you'll have to put all your stuff in storage. i wouldnt do this either. if your buyer pulls out then your agents can contact others who were interested. it may take longer but its common for people in a chain to do some waiting

Don’t rent somewhere more than your current mortgage and you won’t have to touch your deposit…?

I would have thought that's easier said than done in many cases, unless you are able to rent something smaller than the house you are selling. I guess it depends where in the country you are.

I think it's fair to be open about the speed at which you can move at offer stage. It helps avoid disappointment or irritation down the line. There are many reasons why people might want to move quickly - pregnancy, relocating for work, aligning with the start of the school year. I would make sure your prospective buyer doesn't have any of those pressing drivers before accepting their offer and let them know you might take a few months to find something.

You have to be upfront with your buyer if you're not prepared to go into rented and that you want to wait for your perfect property to come up. Six months? A year? Forever? Then it's up to them whether they're prepared to wait for you. It also depends how desirable the property you're selling is and whether you'd find another buyer easily or not.

Going into rental has downsides - expense of moving twice for instance - but it does offer benefits. We did it, had thought it would be for up to six months and ended up with 18 months BUT that was really beneficial as it gave us time to get to know a new area, buy a house
that needed work and renovate it before moving in. We would never have been able to buy such a great house if we'd tried to do it fitting in with our selling timeframe. And it meant we were in a great position to make an offer as we were chain-free.

And what is the market like where you are for the type of house you're after? Do they come up often or is it a once in a few years situation?

Well let’s hope when we do come to have an offer, there are properties on the market we like. If not, we just wait a little bit.

well we love the area we are in now, so that’s priority but we also have a 3/4 mile radius of other areas close by we are happy moving too, so we have a good chance of finding somewhere we like as we’re not focused on 1 Town

That’s good.

In my experience having an offer really focuses your mind on house hunting and it becomes a high priority to find somewhere suitable. In a stagnant market like this one, you will not want to lose your buyer if you get a decent offer.

Buyers will normally wait a few weeks or months for you to find somewhere but obviously you won’t feel safe giving them too much time to get fed up and look elsewhere. We ended up buying in an area of our town further out than our original search area ( & more expensive) purely because there wasn’t much available in our search area at the time. It had reached a point where we had to either extend the search area or commit to moving into a rental because it had taken months to get a good offer and we didn’t want to lose our buyers.

We asked our buyers to wait. I didn't want to move into renting and move off the property ladder so we made this clear to them. They still agreed to make an offer, they were first time buyers though so we weren't holding a chain up

Don’t blame you and renting not an option for me whatsoever

We are "settling" on a house that ticks a lot of boxes but we don't love because we don't want to move into rented and neither do we want to lose our buyers. We need to be in by October for school applications though so probably wouldn't do that otherwise. Also we were at the point of exchange on another house that we DID love and the seller change their bastard minds about selling. So we've already wasted so much time. We put our house on the market in May FFS.
If you don't have the same time constraints then you have more options but if we lost our buyer and the same things happened again we wouldn't be in the new place in time and could t afford to take the risk.
I have to say though, as a buyer (and seller!) I wouldn't wait MONTHS for anyway to make up their mind. It's just not worth it. So yeah make it clear before you accept an offer so you're not wasting everyone's time, should they decide they can't wait and want to pull out

It’s a tough situation isn’t it