You can make an offer on the new place contingent on selling your old home. Most sellers hate them, but in a down market more people should be willing to consider one. Any competent real estate agent will know how to write the offer.

As an about to be seller and a seller of three previous properties, I didn't even talk to people with home selling contingencies. It was a waste of my time.

If you buy one and yours hasn't sold yet, you're looking at paying for two mortgages for a while.

My advice to you is to not look for your new house until you get your own house under contract. Especially if you think you can't discipline yourself enough to "just look" to get an idea of prices and neighborhoods, and not to fine "the one".

There is no way we would have accepted a selling contingency on our Tucson house. We needed our house to have as much exposure and marketability as possible.

For us, it was better to have the house actively on the market than to risk having a contingency that would likely fold anyway in a tough market.

You folks are advising the OP as if she was the seller of the home she might want to buy, not the prospective buyer. There is nothing lost if she makes an offer contingent on the sale of her old house. Sure it might get turned down, and probably it will in fact, but then again, it may not.

Nothing ventured, etc.

We are buying a home and are still preparing our own for selling. There is no way we could show our home with 4 dogs, an iguana, a parrot, and a ferret in it- it gets too dirty too fast, even with the critters elsewhere during the showing. So we will have 2 mortgages for a while, but since we are in NC where housing is pretty cheap, we can easily afford it (our 2 mortgages total less than my SIL's one home in MD). We did not put a selling contingency on the house we bought, knowing we'd be OK with 2 mortgages.

If you can't afford to carry 2 mortgages in your area, then you have the option of a selling contingency, or to wait until your house sells to start looking for your new house. IMHO, in the current state of affairs, it is pretty easy to find what you are looking for, as there is a lot of inventory available. At least in my area, you'd be OK doing that. Don't know about where you are.

Good luck with everything.

Would renting out my house be a bad idea? It's paid for so I wouldn't have 2 mortgages. There are gads of houses for sale in this town. It seems like every street has at least one house for sale.

Renting is something you would need to look into very, very carefully. It can be a positive thing, but it can also be a veritable minefield of problems. You need to do some deep research before taking a step like that. Make sure the research is applicable to your state and community. Laws concerning rental property vary significantly from state to state and city to city. There are also federal laws which if not complied with can bring criminal penalties.

When I owned a couple of rentals, I used a professional residential property manager that was very good at what she did and charged fairly. In my experience, they are a rare breed.

If your house is paid up, I would just save for the taxes, and do what you want (new house), but not rent out, because unless the tenants will be your mother and aunt (examples, of course) you can't be sure in what condition the house will be when you do want to sell, let alone have an open house. People are amazingly negligent when it isn't their place, and their kids invariably end up breaking stuff, they all leave the kitchen a mess and who knows what they'll do with the taps - forgetting to close one at night, and waking up to a ruined ceiling/floor the next day.

If your house is paid for, it's easier to leave it empty. Trust me, the upkeep & taxes that you will be paying for it will be a lot less than if you rent it.

Get ready to pay thousands to clean it up after the renters. If you get good renters you will be very lucky. We've owned properties before and would never suggest being a landlord. We had to fix up the place after almost every renter, costing us thousands.

Your rent would have to be steep, in order to come out ahead financially after the renters move.

I would find a place, buy it and put the existing house for sale once you are in contract with your purchased home. I would leave the existing house staged a little.