The Sale With Three Impossible Goals

A downsizing move that had to hit three hard targets at once, from the money to the timing to a very anxious rescue dog.

A concurrent buy and sell already lives or dies on two things: the money lining up and the timing lining up. This one carried a third complication most agents never plan for, and if any single one of the three went wrong, the entire plan collapsed. Here is how all three came together.

It began in the saddest way. A woman in my church posted that her longtime agent, someone she considered a dear friend, had recently passed away, and now she needed to sell her home. I had lost an agent friend of my own, someone much older than me from a church group I belonged to years ago, and I had a feeling it might be the same person. I called her, and it was. We spent a while talking about what a remarkable person and Realtor our mutual friend had been. Then we turned to what she needed: to downsize from her beautiful two-story home in our neighborhood into something smaller and closer to her daughter.

The first goal was money doing three jobs at once. The sale had to bring in enough to cover every cost of selling, pay cash for her next home, and still leave her a cushion to live on for a set period. That makes the choice of offer everything. Our first offer looked decent, but it came from a buyer whose own home was not even listed yet, which meant it was never going to meet our goals on the timeline we needed. A stronger offer followed, at a higher price, from a buyer who wanted the home enough to come in non-contingent even though they also had a property to sell. That is the one we accepted, because the highest-looking offer and the genuinely strongest offer are not always the same thing, and knowing the difference is the entire job.

"The details that never show up on a spreadsheet are often the ones that matter most, and a real plan makes room for every one of them."

The second goal was timing, which is where these deals usually fall apart. She needed her sale and her purchase to close on the same day, with a short post-possession so she could move her belongings once, directly from one home to the next. Anything less meant paying for a rental, a hotel, or storage to bridge the gap, and every one of those costs would eat into the cushion we protected in the first goal. So while her sale was underway, we went straight to work on her next home. We found the perfect single-story property, negotiated the price and the terms to exactly where they needed to be, and the buyer of her home agreed to a 24-hour post-possession. With a great moving company, she moved a single time, on her own timeline, with no bridge costs at all.

The third goal is the one that never appears in a contract, and it mattered as much as the money. Her dog. She had rescued him, and he was high anxiety and highly reactive, so he needed to be kept away from people during showings and to have his world disrupted as little as possible. We built the plan around him too. Showings were arranged to protect him, and the single move rather than a double move was never only about saving money, it was about not putting him through the upheaval twice. When you are helping someone downsize after a loss, the details that never show up on a spreadsheet are often the ones that matter most, and a real plan makes room for every one of them.

All three goals were difficult, all three had to happen, and with the right plan, they all did. A few days later she emailed me, and part of what she wrote has stayed with me: “We already had some miracles happen with your help, like the appraisal on my house going through and me getting the new house for far less than the asking price. I count that as another miracle. You didn’t know that Heavenly Father has been working through you, did you? Or maybe you did.”

That is why I do this. It is always my goal to help the people who need it, in the best way I know how. If your move feels complicated, a sale and a purchase that have to line up, a downsize, a tight timeline, or simply a lot of moving pieces, that is exactly the kind of puzzle I love to solve. You can learn more about how I approach a complex home sale, call me at 480-415-1341, or email me at Katie@Living48re.com.

Let’s make a plan that works for your whole life, not just the parts that fit on paper.