Moggy wrote:People that have sold and moved home, how did you start the process? Did you first find a place you want to move to, or did you put your home on the market and wait for an offer?
I am not sure I am ready to move, but I would like to and so am wondering the best way to start the process. I am guessing I should get my place valued first so I have a rough idea of what sort of money I would have to put down on a new place?
First thing I did was look at mortgage calculators from the major banks to get an idea of how much they might be willing to lend based on our current position - salaries, savings, equity etc.
From this we could tell if the amount they would lend and the amount we would likely get for our place (we already knew what this would be as several of the same house had sold on our street recently) would give us what we wanted to make the right move (after discounting all the strawberry floating FEES as well!
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Then we got our place formally valued and on the market and started having viewings.
Whilst our place was on the market we started looking at places in the price range which we think we would be able to get. One of the struggles here is that lots of sellers and estate agents get snooty about only wanting to deal with people "in a proceedable position" but we just told people that we had buyers and were in the process of selling ours so please let us look at the house!
One you have put an offer in and have agreed a price then you can finalise your mortgage (they can't do this until you have a final agreed purchase price) and the solicitors can jump in and start the process of selling and buying everything!
The difficulty with the whole process in my recent experience is that everyone wants everyone elses "bit" to be done before they will do theirs - it's like a nest of circular dependencies!