Bridge Loans

What is a Home Bridge Loan?

A home bridge loan allows a move up buyer to purchase a new home without having to sell their current residence until after closing. In real estate terms, this allows you to buy a new home non-contingent on the sale of your current residence.

When you make an offer on a house that you can’t back up without selling your existing home, you usually have to include a contingency clause. This states that you can back out all the way up to closing if your current home doesn’t sell by that date.

What’s Wrong With Contingent Offers?

There’s nothing really “wrong” with contingent offers, from the homebuyer’s point of view. It lets you try and coordinate a home sale and a home purchase so you aren’t stuck in limbo after selling your house, trying to find someplace to live while you purchase a new one. It can also prevent you from closing on a new home and having to manage two mortgages until you can sell your other house.

The real issue is how sellers see your offer in a market as hot as they are right now. When the market is cold and homes are slow to sell with low competitiveness between buyers, a seller might just be glad to have an offer on the table that could come through. However, in a market low on inventory, offers for each available home are usually simultaneous and multiple, and this means sellers look at the ones with the least strings.

An offer with a contingency clause is likely to be passed over quickly, as no seller wants to tie themselves up with a buyer who reserves the right to back out at the last minute based on circumstances out of their control. This means that a contingent offer can kill your chances in a seller’s market.

How Does a Typical Bridge Loan Work?

There are many different types of second mortgages or home equity lines of credit (HELOC) that are marketed as bridge loans. These are tied to your current home equity, and most buyers take them out to access capital for a down payment and closing costs on another home. A HELOC or second mortgage also usually can’t get rid of the necessity for a contingency.

In addition to not being particularly useful for solving the contingent offer problem, interest rates can be staggering for this kind of short term loan. A typical Seattle bridge loan lender will also take both the current and new mortgage into account for qualifying, which can significantly affect your debt-to-income (DTI) ratio and make it hard to qualify for a loan amount big enough to realistically meet your needs.

How Are Sammamish Mortgage Bridge Loans Different?

The Sammamish Mortgage bridge loan is a new short-term first lien on the new home you are purchasing. We are more flexible, and only take the new mortgage into consideration when calculating the debt-to-income ratio. This dramatically increases the reach of our home bridge loan financing as an option for buying a new home while selling your current one.

Once your new purchase closes, Sammamish Mortgage will begin the process of setting up your permanent financing. As soon as your previous property sells, we will finalize a refinance of the bridge loan into a long-term conventional mortgage. This means everything happens seamlessly and you can go from living in your previous home to living in your new one with a minimum of hassle.

Our home bridge loan financing program is currently available for properties located in Seattle as well as the rest of Washington State.

Realtors: if you have buyers that are currently stuck making contingent offers, give us a call and we can discuss this option in greater detail.