Selling a property can take time, sometimes longer than homeowners expect. While your home sits on the market, you may still be paying for mortgage repayments, maintenance, and running costs, all without any financial return. That’s why more sellers are exploring a practical alternative: renting while selling.
This approach not only helps offset your expenses but can also optimise your home’s presentation and boost your overall financial outcome. Below, we explain why renting while selling is becoming a popular strategy and how it can benefit you throughout the sales process.
The benefits of renting while selling
Renting your property during the sales process offers several key advantages. Depending on the circumstances, the selling period can stretch out for months, and property and maintenance expenses don’t stop. Renting your property helps cover mortgage payments, utility costs, insurance, and general upkeep instead of letting them eat into your savings.
In unpredictable market conditions, properties can take longer to sell. Renting gives you more opportunity to wait for the right buyer at the right price, as opposed to accepting the first offer that comes your way.
Factors impacting the renting while selling timeframe
A typical timeframe from marketing to completion can be anywhere from 4-6 months. Many factors can greatly delay and slow down the sale of your property, the most common being variable market conditions, like:
- Issues in the area, such as food proximity, stock market crashes, or other houses in the same street being sold for less or more.
- Large nearby businesses going in and out of businesses that can affect area value.
- International corporations opening doors in or nearby the area.
These are all market factors that can influence the price and timeframe of your property’s sale.
Exchanging of contracts
It can take anywhere from 4-6 months, on average, to exchange contracts when you’ve received an offer you’re prepared to accept. This can also be greatly affected if your buyer is waiting to exchange contracts on their own property.
The cost of the sale
When selling your property, it’s important to consider all the costs you’ll incur, like:
- Estate agent fees.
- Solicitors’ fees and searches. After that, you can pay a percentage of your property’s value or, in some cases, a fixed price.
- Moving costs, which can vary from company to company and depend on how much stuff you need to move.
- Relocation and storage costs (if necessary).
Are there drawbacks to renting your property while selling?
There are some drawbacks about renting your property whilst it’s on the market that you should be aware of.
If you’re a landlord renting out your property long term and you still have tenants living there, this could make things challenging. It’s easier to sell a vacant property compared to one with tenants. If you can’t terminate the tenancy before the sale goes through, there are a few options. You could serve notice on an existing tenant but this can be risky and drawn out, especially if your tenants refuse to leave. In this scenario, you don’t have the flexibility to sell and vacate the property quickly.
Alternatively, you could attempt to sell the property with tenants ‘in situ’. But again, this can potentially be risky because it could result in the sale taking longer, being less attractive to a buyer, and reducing its appeal to buyers looking for investment purposes only.
The other option is to offer short-term lets during the sale process. This is a much better scenario, because you can still arrange viewings to be coordinated with your estate agent. You will also benefit from far greater yields and it will be much easier to have the property vacated when necessary.
Nestify rents your property short-term while it’s on the selling market
Our team here at Nestify has the perfect letting solution. We will fully manage the whole process and look after the entire short-term rental of your property while it’s on the market.
We have extensive experience in managing short lets during a sale and can work with an estate agent. Convenience aside, a major benefit of short-term renting while selling is you can generate a higher income of up to 50% more. This is from renting short term the whole way through the selling process, potentially covering all costs from your solicitor. Also, being short-term, there will be no tenants overstaying before the completion of the sale.
We employ professional cleaners and manage everything from marketing, linen, guest communication, and maintenance of your property. This makes your house look attractive and clean for potential buyers, making it easier to sell!