BUYING
Can I buy a house before I sell mine?
Short answer: yes, and there are three ways to do it. Which one is right depends on your house and the one you want, and picking wrong is expensive.
Most of my clients aren’t first-time buyers and aren’t cashing out. They’re moving — selling the house they’re standing in and buying the next one, and those two things have to happen close enough together that they don’t end up homeless or double-mortgaged.
It’s the most common situation I work on and the one people get the least useful advice about. So here’s how it actually goes.
There are three ways to do it, and you should pick on purpose
Sell first, then buy. You list, you sell, and you negotiate a long enough completion to go find something. Strongest position as a buyer, because your offer carries no condition about selling. Weakest position emotionally, because there’s a stretch where you’ve sold a house and haven’t bought one, and the market can move underneath you.
Buy first, then sell. You find the one you want and write on it, then list. Best outcome if you find something rare. It requires either bridge financing or the nerve to carry two properties, and your lender will want to see the numbers before you write, not after.
Do both at once with a subject to sale. You make your purchase conditional on your own house selling. Feels like the safe middle, and sometimes it is. Understand what you’re handing over: in a market with any competition, a subject-to-sale offer is the weakest one on the table, and many sellers will take less money from a cleaner offer rather than wait on you.
None of these is correct in the abstract. The right one depends on how distinctive the house you’re buying is, and how quickly yours will sell. That’s a two-part question with a real answer, and it should be settled before you list, not improvised in week three.
How does bridge financing work in BC?
Bridge financing is a short-term loan that covers your down payment on the new house between the day you take possession and the day your sale completes.
The thing to know: most lenders will only bridge against a firm sale. Not a listed house, not an accepted offer with subjects still on it — a sale with the conditions removed. Which means bridge financing is not a backup plan for a house that hasn’t sold. It’s a tool for closing a gap of days or weeks when both deals are already done.
Talk to your broker before you write an offer, not after. The answer changes what you can safely do.
What actually goes wrong when you buy before you sell
Deals fall apart, and the ones that fall apart late are the ones that hurt.
On a Wilden listing of mine, an accepted offer collapsed before completion. That house then sold to a different buyer, and the sellers got where they were going. But between those two events was a stretch where a family had made plans against a sale that no longer existed.
What made that survivable wasn’t luck. It was that the fallback got discussed on day one, while everyone was calm, rather than on the day the phone call came. Every plan that depends on your sale completing needs an answer to “and if it doesn’t?” Write that answer down before you need it.
That’s also why I’m careful about how subject removal dates get set on both sides of a move. Your purchase conditions and your sale conditions should not be racing each other. If your buyer has until Friday and your own subject removal is Thursday, you’ve built a trap.
What I’d tell you to do first
- Talk to a mortgage broker before you talk to me about a specific house. You need to know what you can carry, whether bridging is available to you, and what your lender wants to see.
- Get a real read on your own house. Not a rough guess, and not the assessment — what it would actually list at and how long homes like it are taking right now. Everything downstream is built on this number.
- Decide which of the three paths you’re on, and say it out loud, before anything is listed or written.
- Set both timelines together. One calendar, both transactions, gaps identified in advance.
I’ve run both halves of this for the same clients enough times that the sequencing is the part I’d want you to lean on me for. The house-hunting is the fun bit. The calendar is where the money is.
Subject removal and financing conditions · Deposit vs down payment · How I work with buyers
