Selling Your Home After Lockdown
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The global coronavirus pandemic has affected our lives in many ways. From how we work and socialise with friends to how we celebrate life-changing events such as weddings. As well as affecting businesses it has also impacted other areas of the economy, such as the housing market.
Selling Your Home After Lockdown
Spending a lot of time at your own home during 2020 may have got you thinking about whether it’s really the best place for you to live.
You have decided that space is an issue and working from as well as having children to home-educate means you’ll be looking to upgrade to something bigger in the near future.
Lockdown measures may have made you realise that you would rather be closer to friends and family than where you currently live.
You may think city life isn’t for you anymore and are looking to retreat to the beauty and nature of the countryside.
Whatever your reasons for wanting to move house, there are three main steps you’ll to take to get ready to sell your property and buy a new one.
Step One: Applying For A Mortgage
Unless you can afford to buy a house outright, the first thing you’ll need to do before buying a property is apply for a mortgage. This will allow you to see how much you could potentially borrow to buy a house.
Before taking this step and applying officially with your bank or building society, it’s worth doing a quick check to see how much you could borrow using a simple online mortgage calculator.
This should give you a rough idea of how much you could borrow. You may find it’s more than you thought which will mean being able to look at bigger houses or nicer areas.
If it shows that you can borrow less than you thought, you may want to consider staying put and extending the home you live in or saving up a larger deposit.
It’s worth noting that since the Covid-19 pandemic, many banks have tightened their lending criteria. This is because many peoples finances have been negatively affected during these times. We also don’t know what the future holds.
Extra checks could include asking for several years of proof of income, asking to see bank statements and looking more closely at your outgoings, particularly if you have items on finance. You may be asked to pay these off in full before your mortgage application can go ahead.
Once you have made the decision to go ahead, you can apply with your bank or building society for a decision in principle. This is the bank agreeing that they will lend you the money.
While you can go ahead without one of these, having it makes you a much more attractive prospect to sellers, as they know you’re keen to buy and there are less likely to be hold-ups.
You’ll also want to ensure you have money set aside for other moving costs such as estate agent fees and other moving costs.
Step Two: Putting Your Home On The Market
The next step, of course, is to put your home on the market. Due to Coronavirus, many estate agents are asking that your property has sold before you look around any potential new homes. While it’s understandable to make things safer for all concerned, it can make the process longer, especially if you end up in a long chain.
This is also a good time to choose a solicitor and conveyor.
Here are some ideas for making your home more saleable:
- Give your home curb appeal – tidy the front of your house, clean or repaint the front door and generally make first impressions as appealing as possible.
- Remove all clutter, even if it’s boxed and hidden away in cupboards or the attic.
- Make sure rooms look like what they are designed for. If a spare room is being used as a dumping ground for ‘stuff’ put this into storage and add a bed and nightstand. Potential buyers can often find it hard to visualise what it will look like otherwise.
- When you have viewings, lay up the dining table with placemats and cutlery to give a more homely feel.
- Any rooms with strong colour pallets could be repainted to more neutral tones.
- Give your home a cosy feel with throws, rugs and cushions.
- Make your home easy to walkthrough by removing or repositioning large pieces of furniture.
Step Three: Buying A Property
When your home sells, you’ll then be able to start looking at properties you’d like to buy and in what area.New builds from housebuilders like Coral Homes are one option, or you may choose to go for a period property. It’s all down to personal taste and budget.
As many people now use online estate agents, you may be shown around by the properties owners. This is a great time to ask questions, such as how long have they lived there and what the neighbours are like.
Buying a property is a huge decision that we often end up making based on very short viewing times. Take as much time as you need, ask for more viewings and ask lots of questions to ensure you absolutely know it’s the right place for you to buy.
Once the seller has accepted your offer, things will start to proceed. There will be lots of phone calls, documents to sign and various things to agree on as the sale goes ahead. This process can take anything from two months to a year on average and is often dependant on the size of the chain.
Eventually, you’ll get to the exchange of contracts. This is the part where all the legalities are finalised and neither party can back out. This usually happens a week or two before completion which is when everything is completed and you can pick up the keys to your new property.
