How do I buy a house without selling my own house first?

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qwerty5

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I just saw a house that has gone on sale nearby which would be a step up from where I'm living now. I wasn't considering moving ever but this house that has just gone on sale has many modifications that we were thinking of getting done on our place and would be a reasonable upgrade.

My situation at the moment is that we are half way through our mortgage on our place. I'd say our place is worth about €150K less than the place I'm looking at. We have about €100K in savings.

I'm not sure how feasible it is. And I'm not sure what the right questions to ask are.
I was googling bridging loans but banks don't seem to do those.
I was thinking of ringing the estate agent handling the sale tomorrow and expressing our interest. If we wanted to purchase we'd have to sell our current house first. Might be in their benefit to handle both sales.

Is this dreaming or possible? I can't be the first person thinking of doing something like this. Are there any major questions I should ask or (non obvious) pitfalls that I should keep an eye out for.
 
The first question you must ask is to your lender. Will they give you enough of a mortgage to buy a second house without selling your own?
Although you have not provided us with figures, I presume that the answer to that is no.

Your best bet would be to provide the relevant figures rather than have us extract them from you one by one.

Value of your home:
Balance on mortgage:
Combined salary:
Ages:
Cash: €100k
Any other investments?
Likely price of the house you want to buy?
 
The estate agent likely won't consider any offer you make serious until your house is formally on the market if not sale agreed
 
So 150k difference or more if price jumps up plus costs could easily hit 20/30 k when you taje into account stamp duty, legal, auctioneer modifications to house /new furniture etc. However building costs are extremely expensive now so upgrades might cost more.
Reach out to estate agent, and also to a broker to get idea of what you can borrow, rates etc. Best of luck.
 
Alkers86 said:
The estate agent likely won't consider any offer you make serious until your house is formally on the market if not sale agreed
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Based on several recent conversations with Dublin EAs this is not strictly the case.

It is advisable however to have your house “ready to go” with estate agent engaged and photos taken. You put it on the market the minute you have an offer accepted.
 
We found that EAs weren’t too interested in showing us places until we had accepted an offer on ours, aside from the EA who was selling ours.
We aimed to complete on a sale and a purchase on the same day. It didn’t quite work out due to some oversight by the agent selling a place to us. It got sorted eventually.

Ask your lenders about borrowing the extra and approach the EAs selling the one you want and ask them about marketing yours.
 
Annieindublin said:
We found that EAs weren’t too interested in showing us places
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I’ve never met an EA who’s denied a viewing!

Annieindublin said:
until we had accepted an offer on ours, aside from the EA who was selling ours.
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This varies a bit on the circumstances of the vendor. If they are not in a hurry they may accept a materially higher offer from a party who needs to sell own house first.
 
Just our experience a few EAs refused to allow us attend viewings as we weren’t far enough along the process. Although we had no mortgage to clear and didn’t need to get one, once we had our place sold.

We lost one place we put an offer on, the seller accepted a lower offer from someone who had already sold and had cash in the bank.
 
Never heard of a viewing being declined before either, but we have experienced not having our offer considered until we were on the market.
 
Alkers86 said:
Never heard of a viewing being declined before either,
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Yeah, open viewings are generally just that. Some vendors though, particularly in more expensive areas don't want open viewings so the agent will restrict private viewings to those they feel are ready to go.
 
Leo said:
Some vendors though, particularly in more expensive areas don't want open viewings so the agent will restrict private viewings to those they feel are ready to go.
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I’m fishing in the top 5% of house prices nationally at the moment and haven’t come across this! That’s not to say it doesn’t happen but it’s not the case for the vast majority of buyers.

Another estate agent yesterday told me the same - offers aren’t being refused from buyers in a chain, but often buyers with cash in the bank are preferred at even at a slightly lower price.

His advice was have literally everything ready to go on own house sale. If you really like a new house start bidding and put your own house on the market. It will signal to vendors that you are really keen.

It’s stressful but the only way at the moment.
 
There are a few potential avenues to explore.

1) Come up with a 30% deposit and buy the new place as an investment property in the first instance.

2) Contact Dilosk who are about to launch a bridging product and see where they’re at.

3) Put your own place on the market and try to match the closing dates for the two transactions.
 
Gordon Gekko said:
There are a few potential avenues to explore.

1) Come up with a 30% deposit and buy the new place as an investment property in the first instance.

2) Contact Dilosk who are about to launch a bridging product and see where they’re at.

3) Put your own place on the market and try to match the closing dates for the two transactions.
Click to expand...
Wonder what kind of interest rates being charged on bridging loans?
 
Sunnygirl69 said:
Wonder what kind of interest rates being charged on bridging loans?
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It shouldn’t really matter, within reason of course.

If ‘normal’ rates are, say, 4% or thereabouts now, I’d be happy enough to pay something like 6-8%.

There’s more risk, so the bank needs to make a fair turn.

It’s a cost of the transaction basically.
 
Regarding estate agents not allowing viewings - my son was a first time buyer. He was refused viewings until he had mortgage approval.
 
I moved house a couple of years ago back to.dublin and i found the dublin based estate agents more stringent and they wouldnt proceed unless id an offer on my own house,and evwn asked if ok to confirm with estate agents selling my previous house
 
As an update. I engaged the estate agent and a mortgage broker.
In reality. If I sold my house for €450K and added €100K savings and tried to buy the new house for €600K I'd only have a gap of €50K to fill.
(I know I'm making assumptions about both house prices there).

My finances are not tidy as this wasn't something we were thinking of until a couple of weeks ago.

So we'd need to sell house, pay off mortgage, get new mortgage and buy new house (according to the mortgage broker).

With our finances now while the repayments for the mortgage are very manageable and adding on €50K wouldn't cause us any major hardship on the increased repayments.

But getting a new mortgage would be a problem.
- I changed jobs 3 months ago. (I wasn't thinking about changing mortgages so this wasn't an issue at the time). I've never been out of a job in 20 year but still I'm in probation now.
- My missus is between jobs so no income to count for a new mortgage application. My wages now are more than my wages + my wifes when we originally got our mortgage but getting mortgages was easier back then.
- We borrowed money a few years ago to convert the attic. We owe about €3k on that and it'll be finished this year. I checked last year about paying that off early but it would only have saved me about €100 in interest so I didn't bother.

I know I could probably haggle with banks / brokers to twist stuff for their checklists but I was more interested in following up if it was straightforward (I know it's never straightforward). I'll leave it for 6 months, probation will be out of the way, my missus will have a new job and our loan will be gone so we'll tick more boxes for the banks.
 
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