Buying a house while renting with a lease

DH and I want to buy a house when our lease is up which is the end of next April. I have been looking at lisings online for a while now and we have a feel for what we are looking for and where. We had looked at a couple of houses last year.
My question is, when should we start seriously looking at houses?
There is an open house that we would like to look at but what happens if we start looking at homes and going to Open houses and we find a home that we really like? It's too early.

Does anybody have any advice for us?

Re: Buying a house while renting with a lease

It's hard to say.

Our lease is up Nov 1st. We can't break our lease early and can't sublet.

We started looking in the middle of January, found our house in the middle of February (after looking at about 10 houses).

Between the seller dragging their feet and waiting on COs, we still havent closed yet. Our on or about date was May 15th. Lots of good that did us!

I'm guessing we will be in late June or early July... we will be using the time we will have in the apartment to fix up the house. Rip it apart, paint, etc without having furniture around, etc. If we woul dhave purchased a house with the correct COs and with sellers that wanted to get out, im sure we could have closed in April. But thats not the way it happened.

What we did was decide how many months we would be willing to pay both a mortgage and rent; figure out what month that would be and then started actively looking 4 months before that.

Everyone keeps telling me that not closing yet is a good thing; we wont have to pay rent and mortgage until November. But I JUST WANT IT TO BE OVER BY NOW!!!


Good Luck!

Re: Buying a house while renting with a lease

our lease is up in August and we closed in May. If you close at the end of the month, your payment gets put off for a month (we closed on May 19, our first mortgage is not due until July 1) so that only leaves 1 month of both a rent and mortgage. It really depends on how soon closing can happen, down here in GA, it happened within a month. In NY, closing can take months.

Re: Buying a house while renting with a lease

I would seriously look around 4 months before your lease is up. Figure it'll take you a month (at least) to find a spot, another month to iron out contracts and then some to close. Depending on the seller, they may be able to work with you on a closing date. Friends of mine were in this situation, however there closing wasn't until their lease was up. They put their stuff in storage and crashed with friends for a couple of weeks.

Re: Buying a house while renting with a lease

We actually have a lease that is up in December. And we go to closing sometime next week. Although we know that technically we are responsible till the lease is up (if she can't rent the apartment by then) we are going to be out by the end of this month and although we are also trying to help rent the apartment if nothing happens by July 1st we are outta here. We didn't want it to have to be that way but We are the type of tenants that help out and don't bother the landlord unless we can't take care of something ourselves. And we've only improved the place but the landlady listens to everything her miserable single daughter tells her to do and not do. So we don't feel bad about it. We gave them 2 months notice and there was someone that was willing to rent it and she did not want him so legally that will break the contract. But whatever we figure let her go ahead and try to find us and sue us!

Re: Buying a house while renting with a lease

I started looking about 9 months or so before my lease was up. Mostly casual by going to open houses to check out neighborhoods and see what is out there. I would up finding my house in less than 4 months and even though we weren't 100% ready we moved on it because you never know when you will find something else you will like better. We figured we would eat the last few months rent at worst case - would have been like 3 months. We tried to prolong the closing a bit but the owner of the house was in a rush - so we worked it out with them and they gave us the $$ for one months rent! Wound up then my ceiling in my apartment caved in and I used that as the excuse to get out of my lease! Fate I guess..

But often owners may let you get off of your lease earlier if you give them some notice to show the apartment and if they rent before your lease is up then you don't have to pay anymore - hey they can usually jack the rent up anyway so they don't mind.

Re: Buying a house while renting with a lease

When we were renting and then found a co-op we broke the lease - we lost our security but I have to say it was worth it at the time for the price we were getting.

If you are really sure about a home I would go for it, just make sure you know what the penalities are for breaking your current lease.

With the market now, if you find something decent and it your price range - Grab IT !

Re: Buying a house while renting with a lease

Our lease is up the end of August. We started looking late January. We didn't want to feel pressured at the end of our lease to get anything we saw that was decent. I wanted time to find our perfect place and do anything it needed before moving in. We ended up closing May 2 and taking 2 weeks to paint, buy furniture, etc. Then we went on Craig's List and found a couple to sublet our leased apartment in an hour! They moved in this past weekend. Our building was great and ran a credit check on them and now they pay the rent directly to our building so we are out of the loop completely. It worked out perfectly!