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The Franklin House You Want to Buy Before You've Sold Yours You found it. A house off Lewisburg Pike with the porch you've been describing to your spous...
You found it. A house off Lewisburg Pike with the porch you've been describing to your spouse for two years, and your current home hasn't even hit the market yet. Now you're doing the math in your head at a red light, wondering whether you can pull this off without either owning two houses or renting an apartment for three months in between.
This is one of the most common situations we walk Franklin buyers through, and it's rarely as impossible as it feels in that first panicked moment. It just requires deciding, early and clearly, which order you're comfortable doing things in. That decision shapes everything else.
Almost every version of this comes down to sequencing. Do you commit to buying the new house before your current one closes, or do you sell first and risk losing the house you love while you wait?
Buying first means you might carry two mortgages for a stretch, or you structure the purchase so you don't. Selling first means you have your equity in hand and a clean offer to make, but you may need somewhere to live for a few weeks and you lose control over timing. Neither is wrong. The right answer depends on your cash position, how confident you are your current home will sell quickly, and honestly, how much uncertainty you can tolerate without losing sleep.
What we don't do at Redbird is pretend one path is universally smarter. We've helped clients buy first when their finances and the specific Franklin market conditions made it low-risk, and we've steered others toward selling first because carrying two payments would have stretched them thin. The point is to look at your actual numbers, not a rule of thumb.
If you decide to move on the new house before selling, you're not just white-knuckling it and hoping. There are a few real mechanisms, and part of our job is knowing which ones actually fit your situation.
A sale contingency is the most familiar one. Your offer on the new house is contingent on your current home selling. In a balanced or buyer-friendly stretch of the Franklin market, some sellers will accept this. In a competitive one, especially for a well-priced house in a neighborhood like Westhaven or Fieldstone Farms, a contingent offer often loses to a clean one. We'll tell you honestly where a given listing falls on that spectrum before you write it.
A bridge loan lets you borrow against the equity in your current home to fund the down payment on the new one, then pay it back when your home sells. It's short-term financing, and it costs money, but it can be the difference between getting the house and watching it go under contract to someone else. Whether it makes sense depends on your equity and your lender, which is a conversation to have with a mortgage professional before you're emotionally committed to a specific address.
A home equity line of credit opened before you list can serve a similar purpose, and it's often cheaper than a bridge loan if you set it up early. The catch is timing. Lenders are generally hesitant to open a HELOC on a home that's already listed for sale, so this is one of those moves that rewards planning ahead of the crisis.
There's also the simpler option people forget: a longer closing or a rent-back agreement on your current home. You sell, but negotiate to stay in the house for 30 or 60 days after closing while your new purchase finalizes. It's a small ask that can make the whole puzzle click into place, and it costs almost nothing to propose.
A good chunk of the people we help with this are moving to Franklin from somewhere else, or moving up within it while managing a job and kids and a hundred other things. The distance version of this problem is its own animal. You can't easily pop back to your current city to prep a house for sale while also touring homes here, and the two markets may be moving at completely different speeds.
That's usually where a rent-back or a short-term rental in Franklin buys you breathing room. Landing here, getting your kids settled, then selling your prior home on a sane timeline beats trying to synchronize two closings across state lines to the day. If you're relocating and want to understand the broader mechanics of a move like this, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's homebuying resources lay out the loan and closing steps in plain language, which is a useful backstop to the local guidance we provide.
When a client comes to us mid-panic about a house they've found, the first thing we do is slow the numbers down. We look at your likely net proceeds from selling your current home, your comfort with carrying costs, and what the specific listing you want will realistically tolerate in terms of contingencies. Then we build the offer around the version of this you can live with, not the version that looks bravest on paper.
Sometimes that means writing a clean, non-contingent offer because your finances support it and the house won't wait. Sometimes it means talking you gently out of a bridge loan you'd resent in three months. And sometimes it means getting your current home listed and beautifully presented fast enough that the whole sequencing question mostly answers itself, because a well-prepared Franklin home tends to move.
The house on Lewisburg Pike doesn't have to be the one that got away. It just needs a plan that fits your actual life, and someone on your side who's structured this enough times to know which levers to pull. That's the part we're here for. Get in touch before you write the offer, not after, and we'll figure out the order together.