Selling a house in Manchester when you are downsizing

Moving somewhere smaller, on your own timetable

The house did its job. The children grew up in it and left, the stairs are less welcome than they were, and there is more of it to heat and clean than anybody needs. Wanting to move somewhere smaller is not a problem to be solved. It is a decision, and the only difficult part is usually the timing.

What we buy is the house. That is the whole of what we do here, and it is worth saying plainly at the start, because this is an area where people are sold other things.

Why the chain is the part that goes wrong

Most people downsizing are buying as well as selling, and often buying something in short supply: a bungalow, a ground-floor flat, a place in a particular development near particular people. Those do not come up often. When one does, it tends to go to whoever can move first.

The ordinary route asks you to find a buyer, hope their own sale holds, and then compete for the bungalow with somebody who has already sold. A sale that does not depend on anyone else’s chain removes that. It does not find you the bungalow, and we would not claim it does, but it changes what you can say when you have found it.

If you are thinking about equity release

Clearing the house

Forty years of belongings is the part people put off longest, and it is the part that stops a move more often than the money does. Take what matters to you, in your own time. What is left can stay exactly where it is — furniture nobody has room for, a loft that has not been opened since the nineties, a garage with a workbench in it.

Condition is not a factor either. A kitchen from another decade, a boiler on its last winter, a bathroom that needs doing: none of it changes whether we buy, and none of it is worth spending money on first.