As if moving isn’t stressful enough, try doing it during a pandemic. Moving during a pandemic wasn’t something we thought we would ever do. To be honest, we thought we had found our forever home, but COVID has us second guessing and ultimately making a decision to move to be closer to family. One would guess, selling home during a pandemic would be hard.
Selling our home during COVID-19 has been relatively simple. When we made the decision to sell, I emailed our realtor who we had a prior relationship with. A couple of emails, and one phone call later we were ready to list our house. We have moved a time or two before (or maybe more)! This combined with knowing our realtor made the process smooth.
The pandemic has changed what families are looking for when purchasing a house. The house we sold fit the bill for many families which gave us an advantage in a time when many are working from home. The rising costs and delayed timelines of building a home really helped us draw in a market of people who wanted a new home. Our house at 1 1/2 years old still had the new house smell.
We worked with our realtor over the phone to get our place listed over the Christmas holiday. We never saw him in person through the entire selling process. Listing our house late afternoon on December 23 we thought it would sit on the market for a bit. A blizzard, Christmas, cold temps, a higher price point and a generally slow time for selling made us bit nervous to list. Christmas came early to us as we were lucky enough to have a clean offer less than 24 hours after it hit the market. It took one showing. A showing on Christmas Eve, in a blizzard. Its kind of crazy how everything worked out for us.
Once we had an accepted offer, which happened much quicker than we planned, we had to figure out where we were going to go. Given the quick closing and a prior issue with closing two houses in one day we decided to just plan to put all of our belongings in storage. I am so glad this was our decision.
Finding movers and storage was interesting. While we have moved a lot, we have never experienced a gap of time between two houses. We moved about 120 miles, but needed storage for a fair amount of furniture and other household ‘stuff’. We first contacted a company we had used in a prior move and were very happy with how quickly they responded and their process. Everything was handled on zoom or over the phone. They took all the information we provided, recorded a walk-though of our house on zoom, and provided a quote that included moving all of our belongings into a storage unit, storing our items for an indefinite time period, and moving to our new home. We were happy with the process and the price was under our budget.
On moving day, the movers were great. We were well prepared for them which they appreciated. They came in did their thing and we said good-bye to all of our belongings. At the time of moving, we were not 100% sure how long our belongings would be in storage. We took with us most things we would need to stay in a temporary location. This included school, all books, notebook, textbooks. In all, I think we had 3 or 4 boxes just for school. In the end distance learning made the transition easier.
Closing for the buyers and the sellers were at separate times. Usually there is a separate charge to pre-sign paperwork with the title company we closed with but they waived the fees to keep people separate. It all wend good, and we closed with no problems. So no, selling home during a pandemic was not hard. It might be if it is your first time, but if you want to do it, I say just go for it.