Buying and selling at same time & how to pick a real estate agent

[mrsnamemustache]

I will be moving to a new state soon and plan to sell my current home and buy a new one. I've never been in this position before and I am nervous about buying and selling at the same time. This is still many months away.

Three questions:
1) How do I pick a selling real estate agent? (we have decided we definitely want to hire one, given that our lives will be highly chaotic and I don't think I can handle learning about real estate during that time) I'm thinking I should interview a few real estate agents, but what do I ask? What should I be looking for? I'll be able to get recommendations from friends, but how do I evaluate these? Do I just look for who has done the most volume in our neighborhood (how would I find that out)?

2) I'm sure our real estate agent can help with some of the specifics, but anyone have general advice or lessons learned on buying and selling at the same time?

3) We will be buying when we live out of state. I assume I'll need/want to make a trip to new location before committing to a home. Not sure how I should time this though. I guess about a month before I plan to move? New location is about an 8 hour drive, so hoping not to have to do multiple trips. Any advice on buying from out of state?

A little more context:
Our current house is in a pretty hot market and we think it will sell quickly. The market we are moving to is slower, I think, but not super slow. We are hoping to have 20% to put down even without needing the equity in our own home, and thus avoiding having an offer that is contingent on selling our house for the new house (but not totally sure yet).

To preempt any discussion on this front, I know about the pros and cons of buying vs renting and decided that buying is the way for us to go.

[Guesl982374]

Given you are selling in the 'hot' market, why can you sell your house contingent upon closing on a new house?

[Nick_Miller]

@mrsmeganmustache,

My wife and I are going through the exact same thing at the moment, only we are staying in the same city. I'm sure moving to a new state makes the process even more overwhelming.

A few tips I would suggest, based on my recent experience (on day 44 of the process, and still not closed on either the sale or the purchase, but we're close)...

1) Picking an agent. Well, in your case agent(s) I suppose, because of the new state. We picked our agent because she was a top producer for her large agency, she was super professional, and she promised to be accommodating with our schedule. She is youngish (been an agent for 3 years) but that didn't bother us because we could tell she was motivated (and she provided sales figures to back it up). In short, she marketed herself as someone who hustles.

2) Buying and selling at the same time. We are also selling in a hot market. Our house sold in 4 days and it's not exactly fancy or well finished. Your agent should be able to tell you how hot the market it, as in how many months of inventory is currently on the market. Be prepared to get offers in the first few days if it's a really hot market. So actually I'd start the process of looking for new homes NOW, because it will likely take you longer to find a home than it will take to sell yours. That's the situation we're in. If you're able to get a good mortgage rate with only the 20% down, all the better. We didn't have that ability and we HAD to wait until we at least had an offer before we could start making our own offers. In a hot market, no one is going to entertain an offer contingent on getting an offer unless you wayyyy overpay.

I can't help you with buying out of state stuff. Sorry!

[BMEPhDinCO]

I'm in the same boat as you - selling in hot market, buying in rising market.

For our selling agent, we looked through listings on the market to see who had them, we also looked at real estate sites to see how the agents are rated, and then we interviewed at least 3 of them. Basics to ask are:
1) What are you going to do to market my house? 2) What is your last year list-to-sales ratio? 3) What do you think my house could go for? 4) What would it cost me to sell my house with you? (There are tons of sites online that tell you long lists of questions, these are the basics - you want hard numbers of what they have done)

For buying out of state, we are planning on probably renting there a few months first, to get the idea of where we'd want to live - at the very least, take a weekend trip there and scout out places.

[mrsnamemustache]

Thanks for the comments everyone!

Nick_Miller, I've enjoyed your posts about your experience buying and selling. Thanks for sharing.