Blog Stories Trade Up Houses : A How To

Trade Up Houses : A How To

By Living Room Realty, May 26, 2021

 

This story is a both personal and professional one. So many of you are wondering how to find the confidence you need to know if you put your house on the market, you can find a new one that better suits your needs.

After our 2nd child was born last fall, we needed to make a change. We truly loved our home and our neighborhood and the challenges we were feeling were going to exist long after we came out of our covid setup. We needed much, much more space.

I wanted to share with you how we successfully sold our house and bought a new one during a global pandemic, 2 busy jobs, and 2 kids, one of which was only 2 months old when we started preparing to sell. This outline is only one possible way to make this big change. Your situation could look a little different based on your unique limitations or capabilities.

Here’s what we did:

  1. Made Repairs on our Current Home. We made the necessary repairs and strategic improvements on our current home to ensure that we were going to attract as many buyers as possible. We also used this time to purge belongings that were no longer useful, brought joy, or were going to be a pain to move.
  2. Stage + Style. We arranged the home in a way that maximized the floorplan and layout as much as possible. We styled the home in a way that was going to speak to the most likely buyers. We talked a lot about who our audience was likely to be and for us, that was going to be a stylish (if I do say so) yet grounded couple or individual. This part was a lot of work but a lot of fun.
  3. Moved Out for ~10 days around our listing date. We relocated to a short-term rental as close to the house as we could since there would be a lot of running back and forth to it. With kids in the house, we needed an extra few days to remove most traces of them and have it deep cleaned. *Please, clean your home before putting it on the market. If you do nothing else, do this one.*  This time is then used for Marketing Development which consists of professional photos, digital and print marketing materials, fresh florals, spiff clean, and any last-minute touches.
  4. List it. Do all you can to allow for as many groups to come through as possible. We set an offer deadline once enough interest was earned and choose our winning offer. It was imperative to us that we chose an offer with a maximum rent back option so that we could rent our house back from the new owners while we found and closed on our new place. We were able to get almost 2 months in the house after our one-month transaction was complete and we had 3 months to get it done and be moved out.
  5. We Went Shopping. Made an offer and closed on our new place within 45 days of going into contract on our sale.

Over here at In Good Company, we believe that the best realtors are willing and able to customize their service to your specific situation. If you’re thinking of making a change but are not quite sure how it could look, please reach out. We’d be more than happy to help you make it happen.

I’ll leave you with some photos of our house we sold on Mt. Tabor and the house we moved into.

 

-VA

 

Old House: 2 bedrooms, 1 bath on 4000 sq ft lot

New House: 4 bedrooms, 3/5 baths with ADU + 2 car garage on oversized lot.

Living Room Realty

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  • T: 503-719-5588
  • welcome@livingroomre.com

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