Is 2017 the time to buy your new home
Deciding whether to sell first or to offer on an impulse for your dream home is one of the biggest decisions of your life.
And with a new year fast approaching it is often a time when people are thinking about making a move.
Perhaps you have been proposed to and want to buy your dream home.
It can be tempting, when you have been looking for a new home for a while and have seen nothing that appeals to take the plunge and tell your solicitor to offer however, at this early stage, your solicitor should be advising caution.
The process of entering into a binding legal contract for the new house is not a long one.
Typically, you will come under some pressure to commit yourself to the purchase within two to three weeks and once you have done so, there is no turning back.
You will incur penalties if you can’t pay on the agreed date of completion, and may even lose the house if you can’t complete within two weeks after the date of entry.
For the process of selling your home, the Home Report and floor plan needs to be prepared, photographs taken and sales brochures drafted.
You should allow a minimum of seven days from the day you instruct your solicitor to sell your house to the day it goes live – in other words, the day when you arrive home to find the For Sale board in your garden.
If you have a number of people wishing to offer for your home, your solicitor will advise you to set a closing date for all interested parties.
It may be a week or two before you generate enough interest to make a closing date worthwhile.
Once an offer is received, as with your purchase, it can take a couple of weeks for missives to be concluded.
The date of entry will have to be set to coincide with the date for the house you are buying.
You may need a mortgage to buy the new house. If so, the earlier you apply the better. However, you need to know how much you can borrow.
That may not be possible until you have secured a sale of your existing house.
You will also not want to stretch your budget for the new home too far, bearing in mind interest rates may rise and the payments on your new mortgage might become more expensive.
If all this sounds too stressful, it might be best to do things in a different order: speak to your solicitor first, to get sensible advice on a range of issues - the state of the property market, how sellable your house is; whether anything needs to be done to it before it goes on the market - your solicitor or his property team can guide you on that; and how long your solicitor will need to get it live.
Bear in mind the length of time it’s been on the market, the valuation, the condition of the property, the level of interest, what others have sold for in that area and, crucially, your budget.
Armed with that knowledge you will stand a better chance of offering successfully.