'Buy before you sell' options are remaking real estate

Last year, when Matt Gehr and his wife, Amber, decided to upgrade their condo for a single-family home, they had some advantages.

Among the biggest: just enough savings to be able to swing a 10% down payment on a new place without having to sell their current home. Doing so would have wiped out their savings, but it was a fallback option.

The couple got lucky, however. They made a contingent offer on a new house that was accepted, mostly because they offered a nonrefundable deposit of $5,000. And their condo sold surprisingly quickly, well within the 20 days specified by the contract on the new house.

Still "it was super-stressful," Gehr told USA TODAY, noting that paying two mortgages at once would have been "brutally difficult."

"It was dead for two weeks. We didn't have a showing. We didn't have a phone call. It was just really stressful for us, even in a situation that was probably better than many people's."

First-time homebuyers get a lot of attention, but as any real estate agent can attest, lining up all the moving pieces for buyers who are selling at the same time can often be a bigger headache.

In 2026, a robot can write a book for you, and SpaceX is planning to send people to Mars. But the process of buying and selling homes at the same time seems hopelessly past-century – not to mention especially hellacious among all the difficult consumer experiences out there.

Now, a fresh crop of companies aims to smooth these pain points with an approach often referred to as "buy before you sell." It uses innovative mortgage financing that allows customers to buy, and move into, a new residence before their current home sells.

Todd Galde, a Bay Area mortgage broker who has specialized in such moves for the past several years, says the moment is right and the need is real. Like hundreds of other mortgage professionals around the country, Galde uses financing options from a company called Flyhomes to enable those transitions.

With his clients, especially older adults who may be moving into the last home they'll ever occupy, "my story basically is helping them turn the page on this new and exciting chapter in their life," Galde said.

Though there are costs involved in the transactions, clients know that's part of the package when making such a big move, Galde said. The new approaches are valuable for how they ease the process, allowing people to focus on the life changes, not the logistics.

Changing the way people move

The machinations that go into trying to plan simultaneous transactions can be mind-boggling.

"I always tell my clients, plan for A, B and C," said Jill Comfort, an agent in Phoenix. "It might be something as simple as the lender on the house that's being sold wasn't able to get a wire transferred in time, and that delayed the recording of the property."

What's Plan B? "Make sure you have either a hotel or a VRBO or a friend's house − somewhere to stay until the close." And don't try this at the end of the week, unless you want to chance being stranded over a weekend, Comfort warned.

Flyhomes was founded in 2016 specifically to address the buy-before-you-sell conundrum, CEO Tushar Garg told USA TODAY.

"Our insight was that we could fundamentally change the way people move," Garg said. "The traditional financial system is not set up to simplify that."

Garg believes the "frictions" we all expect to encounter when we buy and sell aren't just inconvenient but actually dampen activity in the housing market and stifle mobility.

There's some data to support that idea. An analysis from Realtor.com for USA TODAY found that roughly 60% of sellers were concurrent buyers in 2025. "In a housing market where the mortgage rate lock-in effect is still so dominant, these joint buyer-sellers play an important role," Realtor.com economist Jake Krimmel told USA TODAY. "In short, they get markets moving and liquid again."

Most homeowners won't qualify for two mortgages

The logistical challenges involved, however, represent a big roadblock to that mobility. In most cases, homeowners who already have a mortgage won't be able to qualify for a second one – even if they think they can stomach the cost. One Flyhomes product, the Guaranteed Backup Contract, is essentially a standing offer from the company to buy the departing home. Having such an offer allows a client to qualify for a mortgage on a new home, before even listing the existing one for sale.

In other cases, a homeowner won't be able to even scrape together a down payment on a new property until equity is unlocked from the existing one. Flyhomes and other companies in the space can help with that, too.

Ashlee Sheppard, an Atlanta-based loan officer with Fairway Mortgage, specializes in the buy-before-you-sell options from a company called HomeLight. (Products from both companies are available only through mortgage professionals and not offered directly to consumers.)

Most customers, on being told there's one financing option that can handle the entire process for them, think it's too good to be true, Sheppard told USA TODAY. "They're like, ‘What's the hook?'"

Sheppard ticks off the HomeLight Buy Before You Sell advantages: "It allows the client to move to their next home without selling their departing residence. It also allows them to unlock equity, if it's available, to use for a down payment. It allows an agent to structure an offer with no sale contingency, which is what everybody loves. And as the lender, I can omit their first mortgage payment, so I don't have to qualify them for two mortgage payments at once."

Traditional options for buying and selling simultaneously

There are, of course, other tried-and-true options for a simultaneous buying/selling experience beyond just white-knuckling it the way the Gehrs did.

Homeowners can choose to tackle the sale first and stay somewhere temporarily until the departing residence has been sold and the money is in the bank. But that often means moving twice, which can add up financially and be a huge hassle.

Jen Stanbrough, a real estate agent in the Des Moines area, sometimes suggests that clients consider using a home equity loan on the departing residence to finance the new one. But traditional lenders may not be able to handle all the different pieces of a transition that uses existing equity for a new mortgage. The value proposition of working with a buy-before-you-sell company is that the whole process can be seamless.

Another option is bridge loans, which help finance the transition period between the two closings. But because such options accrue interest the longer a borrower holds them, they can get expensive quickly. Most of the real estate agents interviewed for this piece say they shy away from recommending bridge financing to clients for exactly that reason.

To some extent, however, what HomeLight and Flyhomes offer is most similar to bridge financing: HomeLight charges a flat fee no matter how long the entire transaction takes, while Flyhomes in many cases has lower fees, but interest does accrue. The convenience factor is what sets the newcomers apart.

Marilyn Smolynec and her husband, Ed, have lived happily in their townhome in Simpsonville, South Carolina, for the past seven years. Transplants from New Jersey, they appreciated the lower taxes and more affordable cost of living in the South.

But the couple, both retirees in their 80s, had their eye on a larger single-family home. They could swing the monthly payments, they discovered. The challenge would be in making the transition work.

The Smolynecs found Galde, and he matched them with Flyhomes loans that allowed them to apply funds from the departing home and to present a Guaranteed Backup Contract to the new lender so their existing mortgage could be omitted from the underwriting equation.

All told, the couple paid a little more than $7,000 for the experience, which Galde estimates would have been nearly $9,000 with a traditional bridge loan.

The process was "much easier" than their experience moving from New Jersey to South Carolina, Marilyn told USA TODAY. She and Ed appreciated how Galde held their hand throughout the process and smoothed over the bumps. Being able to defer the new mortgage payment was a bonus for retirees on a fixed income.

In the end, aligning a home purchase with a simultaneous sale is always likely to be stressful, because both represent life stages that are transitioning, Stanbrough said. To that end, the most important step consumers can take is to run through all the options with trusted real estate professionals – and then take a deep breath. "It's just a lot. It's a big transaction," she said.

"Don't underestimate the emotional load that comes with both buying and selling a home at once, and just give yourself some grace for that."

This story was updated to correct a typo.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Buy before you sell' options are remaking real estate

Reporting by Andrea Riquier, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect

Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

This story was originally published May 29, 2026 at 12:09 PM.