Moving Away from Home: Case Study

Moving from your first home can be a stressful time, case studies can be useful to give you an insight into what other people experience when they move out of a property.

Julie had been living in her first home for three years but she now wanted to move out and buy a house with her boyfriend.

Where to Start

“Even though I was excited to be moving in with my boyfriend I could not stand the thought of having to move from my house and packing up all of my belongings. I also had to think about arranging a new joint mortgage which I had no idea about.” Explains Julie.

Julie and her boyfriend had already found a property that they wanted to buy so she had to think about selling hers.

“I visited a few local estate agents who said that my property should sell quite well easily. A valuer came around to the house and valued it. I bought it for £110,00 and he valued it at around £112,000 which I was quite pleased with.

“Once the house was on the market I had to keep my house tidy so if anyone wanted to come around and view it they could,” says Julie.

Finding your Next Property

Julie’s house took about two months to sell. In that time she organised the mortgage for the new house.

“I decided to transfer the mortgage I already had on my property to the new house. It was just a matter of remortgaging onto a different deal, we were able to borrow more money because we had both our wages. My boyfriend had a small deposit for the house so that equalled out with the profit I had made on my house.

“We had to get a Home Information Pack (HIP) drawn up before we could sell our property. The estate agent offered to do our HIP for free if they managed to sell our property. I had a couple of offers that matched the asking price but I chose to sell to a first-time buyer. There was no chain so I was able to get a quick sale.

“It did seem to take forever to get the contracts exchanged but once we had exchanged the process moved quite quickly,” explains Julie.

Julie’s next step was to inform her electricity company, local council and telephone provider that she would be moving to a different property. She cancelled all of her bills and left a forwarding address for the new occupants to send all of her post to.

“It was a bit emotional moving out of my first property but I found because I was already on the housing ladder it was a lot easier to move into a new property. I took a lot of my experiences from moving from my first property and found the process went quite smoothly,” says Julie.

Julie’s next step was to arrange for a removal van to collect all of her belongings and move them to the new property. She enrolled the help of her friends and family as well as hiring a professional removal van.

“Moving into the new house was a great experience and with the help of my friends and family it was a lot easier moving out of one property into another,” says Julie.

Moving from your first property can be exciting as well as scary, it is good to be as prepared as possible in order for it to run smoothly, you should speak with your mortgage lender and estate agent every step of the way to make sure you don’t encounter any problems.