House gone sale agreed when to look for a rental property

We accepted an offer to sell our property a few weeks ago. Contracts have been sent by our Solicitor to the vendor with a closing date for the end of April. The purchaser has arranged for a survey to be carried out but as yet I do not think a valuation has been requested for the property.

We are planning on renting another house for a while before looking to purchase another property as I’m due baby no 2 in early August and don’t think I could cope with the stress of looking for a new house until after the new baby is born.

We don’t want to find ourselves in the situation that we have signed a new lease on a property and the purchaser has pulled out. If we are renting another property, do we need to wait until contracts for the sale of the property have been signed or wait even longer? We know that there is no guarantees that the sale is going to go through but we need to have somewhere to put our stuff and be able to move in somewhere as well before we sell our own property.

Any advice please.

You should not sign a lease until you have the signed contracts back from the purchaser.

Even then, although the buyer is legally oblilged to close the sale, they might have a problem with finance or they just might refuse to close the sale on time.

Financially, the best thing to do would be to sign a lease for a very short period of time with the option to extend it.

Or maybe, explain your situation to the landlord and ask for a get out clause after two months, if your buyer does not complete.

So

1) Do not start looking for a new place until you have a signed contract from the purchaser.
2) Look for a place to rent. When you agree everything, ask the landlord for a get out clause
or
2a) Don't sign the lease until you have the money in your bank account.

Brendan said:

...
or
2a) Don't sign the lease until you have the money in your bank account.

Click to expand...

But is it not the case the the money won't be in your (solicitor's) bank account until the closing date, at which point you've also handed over they keys and moved out?

How much notice do you think you will need before you find a suitable house to move into?

2a) Don't sign the lease until you have the money in your bank account.

Agree fully ... I went sale agreed on a property ..... it took over a year to get all the complexities sorted.

Until you see hard cash .... sale agreed/contracts signed mean nothing as anything can crop up that may delay the transfer of funds.

I have a situation at the moment in my office where my client is at the end of a chain of Purchasers/Vendors and all of the contracts are full of "get out" clauses so the problem will be the matter of certainty of the whole chain completing before we can all be sure that the deal will happen.

My suggestion to all is that we should try and get to a date where all of the loan cheques have issued to the respective Purchasers' solicitors and agree to make all the contracts binding at that stage and agree on a closing date 10 days after that date.

I think other than that my advice to a Vendor would be - move in with Mammy ( if you can!) before committing to a long rental agreement.

Its not much fun out there!

mf

thanks for the replies.

unfortunately as we have one almost two year old and another baby on its way moving in with family is not an option.

The person buying our house is a first time buyer so hopefully they won't have a long chain to go through and won't have issues with mortgage approval.

There is a few houses available for rent in the areas that we are interested in but am worried in case we are left homeless at the end of April. We need a 4 bed house as we need the extra room to store the stuff we have accumulated or else to find a cheap long-term place to store our furniture for six months or so.

Also with being pregnant I am trying to keep my stress levels to a minimum although selling a house is probably not advisable to help with stress levels!!

Our solicitor has also advised us not to sign any lease until we have got signed contracts which seems like a sound piece of advice and also echoed by you the experts on here.

We are looking at one place to rent but if we are interested will obviously delay signing any lease until we know we have signed contracts.

Are landlords usually agreeable to this? Would most landlords be happy to accept a two month contract with options to renew after that period?

I presumed that we would not get money in the bank until the sale is completely closed. Do we get a deposit cheque to lodge into our bank account? I presumed that stayed with our solicitor until sale is closed?

I sympathise with you as I went through a similar situation a few years back. I actually moved house 2 weeks before my Due Date.
My advice:
Don't rent a place until you have a signed contract.
Keep ringing your solicitor for updates on how things are going, don't wait for them to get back to you with news.
But keep on top searching on Daft and make contact with a few local letting agents so they know you are there waiting when you have a signed contract.
You can most likely extend your moving date by a couple of weeks if you need to with agreement from the other party. The other side may delay it anyway due to getting final documents together etc.
You won't get any of the money until the whole sale has closed. The solicitor will hold the deposit money until then.

Be careful, this happened to us. We signed a lease on a rental property 2 days before our sale was due to complete – our property was sale agreed 5 months previous and contracts were signed about a month before we signed for the rental lease. Purchaser had messed us around from the start and keeping with form, didn’t close on the agreed date. We ended up having to fund a mortgage payment and a rent payment for 2 months running (at worst we were willing to accept one month overlap). It wasn’t easy financially speaking, never mind the stress. You will see from a previous post in a different thread, that we had to issue a completion notice to the purchaser to get the deal closed.

It wasn’t really the risk of the sale not going through but rather when and also the cost and hassle of trying to co-ordinate things. We had agreed the closing date, and on that basis signed a lease. The buyer didn’t keep to his word and therefore we were caught with both payments for two months. Had the sale fallen through, yes the 10% would have covered the cost but, we had everything moved into the rental in time for the closing. Was very stressful!

Hi there,
Just been through what you describe - am 8 months pregnant with no.3 and just moved into rented house on Friday last! We only signed contracts on the rented property when we knew the cheque had been issued from the sellers bank - but we had spoken with the rental agency and told them we wanted the house and would be prepared to sign in a couple of weeks and they were happy to hold it for us. The house is new and needed a few things to be finished so it suited both parties.
I too got really stressed thinking we wouldn't have anywhere to live and all you want to do is get settled and ready for the new arrival! We missed out on a few houses we were interested in renting and I was devastated but it really worked out for the best and we found a lovely house to rent (would even consider buying it at some point its so nice). I don't think you will be stuck finding a place to rent - although there are some real holes out there and you might shudder at the thought of bringing a newborn home to them! Talk to the people renting if you find somewhere you really like and they might just hold onto it for a couple of weeks...
Best of Luck with everything!

When I moved back from the US - I moved back in with my Mam and Dad - along with Hubby and 2 kids (did I mention I was also expecting number 3 at the time). At the same time 2 of my sisters moved back home also from various other parts of the world. Oh did I also mention that it was a 3-bed semi??
So everything is possible!! Now - I wouldn't recommend it for very long but it worked for us for 6 months until we found a suitable rental.

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