Buying your first home can feel complicated, but moving from one home to another often adds another layer.
For most move-up buyers, the challenge isn’t simply finding the next home. It’s figuring out how to sell your current home, access the equity you’ve built, buy the right property and coordinate both transactions without putting yourself under unnecessary pressure.
Should you buy first or sell first? What happens if you sell and can’t find another home? Can you make an offer conditional on selling your current property?
There isn’t one strategy that’s right for everyone. Before you start looking at homes, it’s important to understand your options and have a plan.
Start With Your Current Home, Not Your Next One
It’s tempting to start browsing listings as soon as you’re thinking about moving. But before seriously looking at homes, you should understand your current position.
The first step is getting a realistic idea of what your existing home could sell for in today’s Kingston market. From there, you can estimate how much equity you’ll have available after paying off your mortgage and accounting for the costs associated with selling.
You’ll also want to speak with your mortgage professional to understand your financing options.
A few important questions to answer are:
- How much equity will we likely have available from our current home?
- What can we comfortably afford for the next home?
- Do we need to sell our current home before purchasing?
- Could we temporarily carry both properties if necessary?
- Is bridge financing an option?
- What is the lowest sale price we’d be comfortable accepting?
Once you understand those numbers, you can start thinking about the bigger strategic question.
Should You Buy First or Sell First?
This is usually the biggest decision for a move-up buyer.
Both strategies have advantages and disadvantages.
Buying First
Buying first gives you certainty about where you’re going before selling your current home.
That’s particularly valuable if you’re looking for something difficult to find—maybe a specific neighbourhood, a larger lot, a certain school area or a home with features that don’t come onto the market very often.
The trade-off is risk.
If you purchase your next home before selling your existing one, you need to be comfortable with what happens if your home takes longer than expected to sell or sells for less than anticipated.
That’s why understanding the marketability and realistic value of your existing home is so important before making this decision.
Selling First
Selling first provides much more certainty.
You know exactly how much your home sold for, how much equity you’ll have available and when you’ll need to move.
It can also put you in a stronger negotiating position when buying because your offer doesn’t necessarily need to be conditional on selling another property.
The downside is that the clock starts ticking.
Once you’ve sold, you need somewhere to go. That can create pressure to buy a home that isn’t quite right simply because your closing date is approaching.
Fortunately, there are ways to structure a sale that can help reduce that risk.
What Is a Suitable Accommodation Clause?
One option when selling first is to make the sale of your current home conditional on you finding suitable accommodation.
In simple terms, you’ve found a buyer for your home, but the transaction doesn’t become firm until you’ve secured somewhere else to live within an agreed period.
This gives you some protection against selling your home and then being unable to find a suitable replacement.
However, there’s a trade-off.
Your buyer is now being asked to wait while you search for another property. That uncertainty can make your offer less attractive to them compared with a sale without the condition.
Whether this strategy makes sense depends on your property, the strength of the market and how difficult you expect your next home to be to find.
What Is a Sale of Purchaser’s Property Condition?
Another option is to reverse the strategy.
Instead of selling your home first, you find the home you want to purchase and make your offer conditional on successfully selling your existing property.
This is commonly referred to as a Sale of Purchaser’s Property condition.
It can significantly reduce your financial risk because you’re not committing to owning two homes without knowing whether your existing property will sell.
But there’s an important difference between this and a suitable accommodation condition.
A suitable accommodation condition protects you when selling your current home.
A Sale of Purchaser’s Property condition protects you when buying your next home.
In either case, someone on the other side of the transaction is being asked to accept additional uncertainty.
And that matters when negotiating.
How Your Strategy Affects Negotiations
Conditions aren’t just legal wording. They have value in a negotiation.
Imagine two buyers make similar offers on the same Kingston home.
One buyer has already sold their existing property. The other buyer’s offer is conditional on selling their home.
Even if the prices are identical, those offers don’t necessarily provide the seller with the same level of certainty.
That doesn’t mean an offer with a sale-of-property condition can’t be successful. It means we need to consider the entire offer.
Price is one component, but so are the deposit, closing date, financing, inspection conditions and flexibility.
Sometimes giving the seller their preferred closing date or strengthening another part of the offer can help compensate for a condition they may otherwise be hesitant to accept.
The same principle applies when you’re selling with a suitable accommodation condition. A buyer may be willing to accept that uncertainty, but they may want something in return.
The more certainty you’re asking the other party to give up, the more you may need to give them somewhere else in the negotiation.
Kingston Isn’t One Real Estate Market
Another important consideration is that the market you’re selling into may be completely different from the market you’re buying into.
For example, you might own a home in a price range with a large pool of buyers while moving into a higher price range where homes take longer to sell.
That could make buying first more manageable.
The opposite can also happen. You could be selling a unique or higher-priced property that may require more time to find the right buyer while trying to purchase in a competitive segment of the market.
That’s why we don’t automatically tell every move-up buyer to buy first or sell first.
We look at both sides of the move.
Prepare Your Current Home Before You Find the Perfect One
One of the most difficult situations is finding the perfect home and only then starting to think about selling your existing property.
If you’re seriously considering a move, there’s a lot you can do before actively shopping.
We can establish a likely value and pricing strategy for your current home, identify any repairs or preparation worth completing, discuss staging and photography, review your financing and decide how we’d approach different buying scenarios. You don’t necessarily need to list your home immediately.
The goal is to be ready.
We recently worked with sellers who took exactly this approach. By preparing their home and having a plan in place before they needed to sell, they were able to move quickly when the timing was right. → Read the full case study to see how preparing early helped them sell quickly
If the right property comes onto the market, you can then make a decision based on a plan rather than trying to figure everything out while competing for a home you love.
Don’t Overlook the Closing Dates
Once you’ve successfully bought and sold, there’s still one final piece of the puzzle: coordinating the transactions.
Ideally, your purchase and sale dates work together.
Sometimes both properties close on the same day. In other situations, having a short overlap between the two homes can make the physical move significantly easier.
Bridge financing may also allow you to access the equity from your existing home before its sale closes, provided the necessary financing requirements are met.
This is another reason the highest offer on your current home isn’t always automatically the best offer.
A buyer offering slightly different terms, a stronger deposit or a much better closing date could ultimately make your entire move easier.
Have a Plan Before You Start Looking
For a move-up buyer, finding the next home is only one part of the process.
Before we start seriously looking, we want to understand:
- What is your current home worth?
- How much you can comfortably spend?
- Do you need to sell before you buy?
- How difficult will your next home be to find?
- How quickly do we expect your existing home to sell?
- Which conditions or strategies can we use to manage the risk?
Once we understand those pieces, we can build the right strategy around your situation.
At MoveSmart Collective, our goal isn’t simply to help you sell one home and buy another. It’s to help you coordinate both sides of the move so you can make good decisions without taking on unnecessary financial or timing risk.
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