Bridge Loan. Anyone use one for a home purchase?

Have done it - structured new house purchase with 2 loans. One was retired when previous house sold. For a while we were paying a note for 2 houses and it was stressful….but we wanted a strong offer w o contingency. Very glad I did it.

Sure it can be done that way. just go into it with a contingency plan. you are accepting the risk of the othe rhouse not selling quickly or not selling at all for what it is worth.

Just make sure financially you can afford two house notes should the sale take longer and also be aware you may feel the pressure to drop the price below its "value" to unload if you don't sell it quickly. IE, are you ok with settling for less then you think its worth just to get out of the second mortgage.

The market is weird right now in some areas. some houses still sell quickly while other sit on the market for a while. In a lot of areas there are more sellers then buyers so they are picky

But if you can afford to accept the risk of 2 mortgage payments for a few months and you really want this house this is option

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Sell your house first. Realtors want the sell and will say anything because they don’t get paid until it closes. Why not put your house for sell and then once it sells then buy a house you want

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I think you're missing the point which is actually getting the house you want. If you sell your house to someone who wants a traditional 30-45 day closing period you have an extremely limited amount of time before you need to be closing on your next house...which means you might just have to take something you dont love, or do something like move to a rental then move again once you find the place you're looking for.

I'm in a similar boat as OP, we arent in any rush to move, but want to move from our townhouse to a single family home now that we have a kid. We arent in any rush until they get to elementary school age in 3 years, but we have a very specific set of things we are being picky on in the next house. Rarely do we see a house we both love and would want to buy pop up, and this is in a very rich market here in the ATL area. I would much rather take a short term bridge loan of some type (even if it's a HELOC or something), and get the exact house we want, rather than just selling our current house and then hoping we find the right place in the short amount time before we have to move out. We would have no issue floating 2 house payments for quite a while, but I'm not draining all our savings to put on down payment on the new house either which is why I'd want to use someone else's money to float the transition in the meantime. IF it came down to it and our house wasnt selling after say 3-ish months, I'd just take a below market offer to offload it at that point, we have a ton of equity in this place anyways.


On top of all that, it would be way way less stress on us to not have to get our house ready to sell with all our stuff in it, including 3 cats and a toddlers stuff...instead we'd be out with all our stuff and able to do some work it needs done without disrupting our lives and maybe even professionally stage it to get max value out of it.