A short instructional video/transcript by Andrew Lam (owner, Andrew Lam Real Estate team) explaining how to simultaneously sell a home and buy a new one. Lam describes a stepwise process—prepare and list the seller’s home first, concurrently search for replacement properties, use contingencies on offers to avoid owning two homes or becoming homeless, and coordinate listing and buying specialists within his team to manage the process efficiently. He also notes handling specialized cases like 1031 exchanges and invites viewers to contact his team for personalized help.
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Hey guys, it's Andrew Lam. Today we're talking about how to sell your home and buy a home at the same time. Hey, thanks so much for joining us on our real estate blog again. I am Andrew Lam, owner of the Andrew Lam Real Estate team at KW Back of Valley. And today we're talking about how to both sell a home and buy a home at the same time. Now, I get this question a lot from people who are very hesitant to start with the process of getting their home on the market until they find the perfect home. And the issue with that, and I just had this conversation, the issue with that is if you fall in love with the house and you go to write an offer, you now cannot do so because you still have to get your home sold and show the owners of the home you're writing an offer on, that your home is actually listed on the market and you know, potentially could be an escrow relatively quickly so that they accept your offer versus taking someone else's offer who is not contingent on on selling their home first. So I actually call it the real estate catch 22. And how do we avoid the real estate catch 22 of either owning two homes because your home didn't sell or being homeless because your home sold before you were able to buy another home? The way we avoid that is through contingencies. So our team has a process by which we actually help you sell your home first. That's the first step. We prep your home to go in the market and get it ready for sale first, and then we concurrently start looking for properties. We don't write any offers though, until we get your home ready to go on the market. The reason why we do that is because it's the first step in the process, right? It's the first cog that we have to or the first domino we have to knock down in order to get this process going. If you have to use the proceeds from the sale of your home, let's just knock that out first. Sit down, figure out what your home is worth and what it could sell for in today's market, walk through our 151 step marketing plan and then show you how we can get it on the market to get multiple offers within one to two weeks so that you can then write a really strong offer. And even though it's contingent, it's almost the same as any other offer because we already have offers on your home. The second step, then, after listing your home, is to sit down with one of our buyer specialists and figure out exactly what it is you're looking for because we don't want it to take three to six months or I've heard horror stories of a year or more to find the right home. Honestly, if we're doing our job correctly, the way we do things is we sit down, we figure out exactly what your wants and your needs are, and we figure out the three to five homes that match exactly what you're looking for. So instead of spending a ton of time looking at everything on the market, we really whittle it down to what's going to work best for you. And the way we do things, it's not us picking the properties for you necessarily. We, we show you the options, and you're the one identifying the three to five that best fit your wants and your needs. So we really do this collaborative process where you have a listing specialist helping you with the sale of your home, and then you have a buying specialist helping you with the purchase. And we all communicate together and we make sure all the I's are dotted, all the T's are crossed so that you have a very smooth and efficient process doing both. Now, what's great is the way to Prevent that catch 22 is we actually have a contingency for you to buy another home when you're selling your home so you can get offers on your house. That doesn't necessarily guarantee you're going to sell it because you have the contingency saying in writing you need to find a replacement property first. So that's how you can get your home on the market, get multiple offers, get your home in escrow. And if you don't find that perfect home, then that's fine. You actually don't have to sell it. But we've done the first step to make sure you can buy another home. Now, on the other side of that, when you're buying a home, we write the offer contingent on you selling your property first so that you also don't end up owning a second home without having first sold your current property. So we do this all the time. We help a lot of people trade up or move down if they're downsizing. And it's actually a lot easier if we handle both sides of the process because again, we have a fully dedicated team. You have a team of experts and specialists working on every single aspect of, of the home buying and home selling process. And we're able to handle that without dropping any balls. A single agent trying to do that, you know, more than handle more than two or three of those at a time is probably going to drop balls somewhere where we have a full time dedicated assistant and we have the agents on either side to help you do that. If you have any questions about this process at all, feel free to reach out, give us a call, shoot us a message, or send us an email. Reply back, comment on this and we'd be happy to answer them. Again, no obligation, no hassle. We just love to help people through the process. And if you just want to be walked through the step by step for your specific scenario or situation, or even a 1031 exchange where you have to sell one and buy one within a certain period of time, we do those as well. Thanks so much for joining us today and we look forward to talking to you again soon.
