How One Front Range Family Sold and Bought at the Same Time

By Matthew Jensen

Matthew Jensen brings an authentic, honest, professional, and positive attitude into every interaction. Whether its working with a first-time home buyer or selling a luxury listing, it's Matthew's philosophy that everyone gets the same high-level of service, no matter the size of the transaction.

The inspection report came back with one line that could have collapsed two deals at once: the house needed a new roof. My sellers were already selling at a number with almost no wiggle room, because every dollar from that sale was going toward the home they were trying to buy. An unexpected expense like a roof, dropped in at exactly the wrong moment, is the kind of thing that can quietly derail both transactions. And this family had a lot riding on both.

I’ve known the dad since high school, and I’d helped this family buy their last home. They remodeled the whole thing and really thought it’d be their forever house. Then they had another child. Suddenly three boys were splitting two bedrooms, and they’d simply outgrown the place. They wanted a different school area, they wanted to be closer to friends, and since both parents are educators, they wanted to move before the school year started. None of that was negotiable to them.

What made it hard was the money. They had to sell their current home at a certain price to have enough to buy the next one, and there wasn’t a huge margin for error. When the sale has to hit a specific figure for the purchase to work, one soft negotiation can take the whole thing down.

So before we listed a single thing, we built a plan. I brought in my preferred lender, Jesse Thompson, and the three of us worked through the real numbers together. What did we need to net from the sale? What could they actually afford on the purchase? What concessions might we need, and where could we give a little versus where we absolutely couldn’t? That became our roadmap for both sides of the move.

Then came the part where the roadmap got tested. We put their home on the market and went all out on the marketing. Showing activity was good, open house traffic was strong, and after about two weeks we had the offer we needed. But an offer is only the starting line. I had to be very clear with the buyer’s agent that my sellers couldn’t go below a certain number, and this wasn’t stubbornness for its own sake. Drop that line below, and they couldn’t buy the next house at all.

That’s the moment the roof showed up. So we went back to work. We had a great team that got it replaced before closing, and I worked out an agreement with the buyers: if my sellers handled the roof, the buyers would let some of the other inspection items go. They agreed, and the deal held.

All of this was happening while we were hunting for their next place, and we weren’t just looking for a house; we were looking for the house. We probably walked through 20 to 30 homes, because the list was long: the right school area, close to friends, enough room for three growing boys, and a price that fit a very specific budget. Eventually we found it. Every boy could have his own bedroom, the location worked, they loved it, and they could actually picture their family growing up there.

The catch was that paying full price under the original terms wouldn’t work financially. So we had one more negotiation in front of us. Jesse stayed in constant communication about what we could and couldn’t do on the lending side, and I negotiated more than $20,000 in concessions from the seller. That was huge. We also couldn’t give up certain concessions because the entire transaction depended on them.

Between selling the old house, the new roof, the purchase price, the seller concessions, the financing, and even bridging the week between the two homes, we kept working the problem until every piece fit.

That’s the part people don’t always see about buying and selling at the same time. It isn’t simply “let’s sell your house and then go find another one.” Sometimes you’re running two negotiations at once, and a single decision on the sale side completely changes what you can do on the buy side.

You need to know where you can give a little and where you have to hold firm, and you need a lender and an agent who talk constantly and watch the whole board. Because the goal isn’t to win every single negotiation. The goal is to get you where you want to go.

This family got there. When it was all done, I dropped off a giant trampoline as their closing gift, and the mom sent me a video of all three boys jumping on it in their new backyard. That’s probably my favorite part of the whole story. A family I’ve known for years took a pretty big swing in a market that left little room for error, and we found a way to make it work.

So if you’re sitting in a house you’ve outgrown, thinking, “I’d love to move, but I don’t know how we’d sell this one and buy the next at the same time,” that’s exactly where the planning starts. Let’s sit down, look at the numbers, and figure out what’s actually possible.

Call or text me at 303-819-6494, email me at mjensen@wkre.com, or visit matthewjensen.wkre.com. I’m Matthew Jensen with WK Real Estate, and I’ll open the door for you.