I agree with all the advice given above, but my personal experience in selling and buying lots of houses in my time is a bit more optimistic regarding synchronizing the closing dates. But keep in mind that much of this experience is old and times may be quite different, and it was all in Ontario, Canada, where real estate practices may perhaps be different.
Most of the time we’ve arranged to have the sale closing and the purchase closing on the same day. With one exception it’s worked out well because well-organized movers can generally move out even the contents of a three-story house in half a day, so by the time they arrive at the new house it should be ready for occupancy. There’s always a risk, of course, since you’re counting on both ends of the transaction going smoothly, so it’s important to have contingency plans, such as opting for storage and staying in a hotel or with friends for a few days. But in our cases it’s almost always gone smoothly.
One exception doesn’t really count because it was deliberately planned. I was trying to buy a house in a very specific high-demand area where it was really hard to do. To give myself maximum flexibility, I opted to move a lot of my stuff into storage for a year and rent nearby while I conducted the search. That worked out well and several good possibilities turned up, one of which became my much-loved long-time home. The facts that I had total flexibility on closing dates, and no condition of selling an existing house, were really hepful.
The other exception involved a bit of drama. We arrived at the new place only to find that it was rented and the renters, for whatever reason, were still in it!
The option we took was to return to the old house and defer the closing. We then retained a lawyer who was recommended to us by our agent, who turned out to be fabulously aggressive and rained fire and brimstone on the sellers, collecting damages by the truckload. The new place closed a few days later, with the seller a good deal poorer than he had expected to be.
A much less dramatic case was the current house, where I pushed my buyer for as late a closing as possible and the seller as early as possible, but there was still a gap of about a week. I just sent most of my stuff to storage, stashed a few personal effects with friends, and went camping for a week.
But as I said, the vast majority of the time, it was possible – at least back then – to synchronize both closings to be on the same day. There’s always the age-old question of whether to sell first and risk being homeless, or buy first and risk having to finance a bridge loan for an indeterminate period of time. In the current lopsided seller’s market, it generally will make more sense to buy first. If you see houses going from “For Sale” to “Sold” in a very short time in your area, as is so common these days in a lot of places, you probably won’t even need that bridge loan. I myself have never needed one. It used to be very common practice when submitting an offer to make it contingent on the sale of the buyer’s existing house, but in today’s very competitive market that makes the offer a good deal less attractive.
