Property Chain?

You don't make an offer on condition yours gets sold. You just make an offer. But you only exchange contracts both on the sale and the purchase when you DO have a buyer, and make sure the same completion date is in both contracts if at all possible - or rather your solicitor will look after that. This is only going to be realistically possible if you look for another house while you're still trying to find a buyer at the same time. Get an offer on your house and THEN start looking for another one and someone's going to get annoyed.

This can all get rather frustrating and until contracts are exchanged, the buyer can get fed up, find somewhere else and pull out. Or your seller could get fed up waiting for you to find a buyer and put their house back on the market in the hope that someone else can complete quicker. And you're back to square one.

Trying to get both completions on the same day could end up just being impossible. Then you've got two houses or no house at all. Bridging loans exist to provide a large loan for a short period to help with having to pay for two houses at once. Or in the case of wanting to get on with it and sell rather than risking the chain fall apart, but the seller of the house you want is being slow (this happened to my sister last year), you could go ahead with your sale and rent somewhere for a short while, as my sister and her boyfriend did.

The problem, of course, is that houses are so expensive that you can't afford the new one until you've got the money from the old one. If you're very rich and can afford to be owning two houses at once, you don't have a problem. If only we were all so lucky!

Update 2 is about right ..

In practice, sellers usually go looking for their new place as soon as they decide they want to move ....

SO, often by the time you have a buyer, chnaces are you have already found the place you want to go to ..

NOTE however, whilst you can 'make an offer' for a new place, the 'exchange of contracts' on your sale and buy needs to happen on the same day !

If not, you either find you have sold your house (and have to move usually within 21 days, often less) and have no-where to go, OR you have purchased a new house and will have to get a 'bridging loan' (i.e. second mortgage at high cost) until your old house is sold ...

You put your house on the market. You receive an offer for it and you then look for another house and make an offer on it. Your question is confusing, do you already own a property, or are you a first time buyer.?

UK

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