How do I buy a house before selling mine with a cash offer?
The direct answer
Yes. I place a bridge program that lets you buy a house before selling yours, with no home sale contingency and no financing contingency in your offer. That is what a seller means by a cash offer. You stay in your current home until the new one closes, move once, and then sell.
It is a loan, and eligibility depends on the property, your credit and your income. You do not have to sell your current home first, and you do not have to move out of it first. A short-term loan secured by your current home and the new one funds the purchase, so you stay where you are until the new home closes, you move once, and only then does your old home go on the market.
You are the buyer of record the whole way through. Your name is on the title of the new home, nobody buys it and resells it to you, and the old home sells at your own pace rather than on a deadline somebody else set. That sale is what pays the bridge loan off.
Now the honest part. A short-term loan carries interest, that interest accrues until the loan is paid off, and the program charges its own fees, all of it disclosed in your loan terms before you commit to anything. You sell on your own schedule inside the program’s published window, a matter of months from the day the new home closes, and the longer it takes the more the bridge costs you. What that comes to depends on your own file, so it is worked out in a conversation rather than published on a page.
Zach von der Linden, mortgage broker and Branch Manager, West Capital Lending · NMLS 1652805
Wholesale pricing · California, Utah, Oregon and Arizona
5.0 across 66 reviews on Experience.com (read on 2026-09-24) · Text reaches Zach directly · Last updated 2026-10-26
This situation is worked out in a short conversation. No credit pull happens from a conversation. The options check is a soft credit pull with no impact on your credit score for the first look. Texts go to Zach's cell.
What clients say
Zach was great. Easy process and he took care of the little things that needed to be done to close the loan and offered up sound advice throughout the process.
Zach, was great to work with. He was super responsive and even when there was challenges or delays he would communicate the needs and we worked through them. We very happy with our experiance and the service we received, and we are even more excited with our new home!
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In a competitive market the offer that waits on your house selling loses to the offer that does not, so buyers with fifteen years of equity keep losing homes they can plainly afford. There is a way to write the other kind of offer without selling, or even leaving, the house you are standing in.
What are the four ways to buy a house before you sell?
There are four ways to buy a house before selling yours: a HELOC on the home while it is listed, a bridge loan, the cash-offer program, or a contingent offer. I help arrange the financing for the options that borrow. One row each, in words.
| What it is | What the seller reads | Do you move first | What the old home needs to do | Fits when | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| A HELOC on the home while it is listed | A home equity line on the home you are selling, separate from your first mortgage, which stays in place. I arrange it for eligible homeowners whose homes are already listed for sale. | An ordinary purchase offer with a new mortgage. The line pays for the down payment or the move, and it does not by itself remove a home sale contingency. | No. The line can close while the home is still listed. | Sell. The line is paid off from the sale proceeds at closing. | You need cash for the down payment or the move, and the offer itself is not what is losing you houses. |
| A bridge loan | A short-term loan secured by the equity in the home you are leaving. I place these. | Depends on how the offer is written and what the lender allows. | Depends on the loan and the timeline. | Sell, and its proceeds repay the loan. The repayment deadline in your loan agreement applies whether or not it has sold. | You need the equity to close first and the offer itself is not the problem. |
| The cash-offer program | A bridge loan inside a program: you buy in your own name, funded by a short-term loan secured against your current home and the new one. I place it. | A contract with no home sale contingency and no financing contingency. | No. You stay until the new home closes and move once. | Sell inside the program's published window of months, with a backup arrangement if it has not sold. | Your offers keep losing to buyers who do not have to sell first. |
| A contingent offer | An ordinary purchase contract that closes after your current home sells. It costs nothing extra. | A contract that closes after your current home sells. | Often, or you negotiate a rent-back. | Sell before or alongside the purchase. | The market is slow or the seller is patient. |
The table describes the four in words. Rates, payments and fees for any of them appear in your loan terms before you commit, and nowhere on this page.
Each one has its own page: Can I get a HELOC if my house is for sale?, Can I get a bridge loan to buy a house before I sell mine?, Bridge loan or cash-offer program: which one fits when I buy before I sell?, and Contingent offer or cash offer: what is the difference for a buyer who has to sell? If your offers keep losing, start with what to do when your offer keeps losing because it is contingent. How far a line can reach is on how high a HELOC can go against your home's value.
Is this page about my situation?
The market punishes buyers who have to sell first. Two offers land on a seller at the same price, one of them waits on somebody else’s house and one does not, and the second one wins. It is not close. People with fifteen years of equity in a home keep losing houses to buyers whose money happens to be liquid that month, and that is a difference in where the money sits rather than in who can afford the place.
A bridge loan flips that, and it does it without turning your life upside down first. It lends against the equity you already have plus the home you are buying, and it funds the purchase now. The contract the seller reads is the one they wanted: no home sale contingency, no financing contingency. You stay in your house until the new one closes, you move once, and the old home goes on the market after you are out of it, on your schedule.
This is not the same question as needing cash before your house closes. If what you need is money in hand for the move itself, a home equity line on the home you are selling is the simpler tool, and that is a different page on this site. This page is about the offer: who wins the house.
Your rate and costs depend on your credit, combined loan-to-value, lien position, the loan and program you choose, and fees. The options check shows your own terms before any hard credit pull.
Does this fit you?
Who this tends to fit
- You found the house, you want it, and you know you will lose it to a buyer who does not have to sell first.
- You have meaningful equity in the home you own now. The bridge is lending against that equity, so it is the thing that makes the plan possible.
- You can carry the timeline. Owning two homes for a stretch is the whole structure, and you need to be able to live with it if the sale takes longer than you planned.
- Your old home is genuinely sellable once you are out of it, at a price you would actually accept.
- You would rather move once than sell, rent, store your furniture, and move twice.
The eligibility facts that matter most
- Equity in the current home: the program is lending against it, and how much you have is the first thing that gets looked at. Confirmed on your own file, not from a page.
- The new home has to qualify too. Property type, occupancy, condition, and location all matter, and the program sets its own limits on each.
- Income and credit are still reviewed. A non-contingent offer is not a shortcut around underwriting; it is a loan, with an application and a full credit report.
- Time to sell: the program’s published condition gives you a set window, a matter of months, from the closing on the new home to sell the old one, on your own schedule; Zach confirms the exact window for your file. The backup arrangement attaches if it has not sold inside that window. Both come from the program terms on your file.
- Availability: the program is not offered everywhere, and Zach places loans in California, Utah, Oregon, and Arizona. Whether it reaches your two specific addresses is confirmed before you write the offer.
- Everything above is confirmed file by file, before you write an offer, so that the offer you write is one you can actually close.
When another route may fit better
- You have little equity in the current home. The bridge is secured against that equity. Without enough of it there is nothing to lend against, and no structure fixes that.
- Your old home is in a market where it could sit for a long stretch. The longer it sits, the more the bridge costs and the longer you carry two homes. If you have doubts about your own neighborhood, listen to them.
- You can simply sell first. If you are not in a bidding war, or the seller you are buying from is patient, selling first is cheaper and simpler, and Zach will tell you that instead of selling you a structure you do not need.
- You would be stretched thin the moment anything slips. This plan has more moving parts than a normal purchase, and moving parts need slack.
- You want certainty about what the old home sells for. Nothing here sets that price. The market does.
What is a buy-before-you-sell program?
It is a short-term loan secured by your current home and the new one that funds the purchase, so you can write an offer with no home sale contingency and no financing contingency. You stay where you are until the new home closes, move once, and then put your old home on the market; that sale pays the loan off. It is a loan, it carries interest and the program’s own fees, and eligibility depends on the property, your credit and your income. For how it compares with a contingent offer, see Contingent offer or cash offer: what is the difference for a buyer who has to sell?
A worked example: the sequence, not the arithmetic
This example is a timeline, because the question is what happens and in what order. Your rate, your payment and the program's fees come from your own loan terms.
Read it as one plausible sequence rather than a schedule anyone is committing to. Dates slip. The last two rows are the ones worth sitting with.
| When | What happens |
|---|---|
| Day 0 | Your offer on the new home is accepted. There is no home sale contingency in it and no financing contingency in it, so the seller is not waiting on your house and not waiting on your loan. That combination is what most sellers mean when they say they want a cash offer. |
| While it is in escrow | You are still living in your current home. Nothing is listed, nothing is packed under pressure, and no stranger is walking through your kitchen on a Sunday. Staying put until the new home closes is the normal way this runs, not an exception someone negotiated for you. |
| Day 10 | You close on the new home, funded by the bridge loan. The program’s published terms describe closings in as few as ten days when the file is complete. That is the program’s condition rather than a promise Zach makes, and it assumes credit approval and a seller and an escrow moving at the same speed. |
| Week 2 | You move, once, into the house you actually wanted. No rental in between, no storage unit, no second truck. |
| Week 3 | Only now does the old home go on the market, and it goes on empty. Staged and vacant it often shows better than it did with your family living in it, and you are not tidying it before every showing. |
| Day 60 in this illustration | The old home sells on your schedule rather than on a deadline somebody else set. Its proceeds pay off the bridge loan at that closing, interest stops accruing the day it is paid, and what is left after the payoff and the selling costs is yours. |
| If the sale takes longer | You hold, and you hold from inside the home you already moved into. You have a set window from the day the new home closes to sell it, a matter of months under the program’s published conditions, which Zach confirms for your file. The bridge loan stays outstanding while you wait and its interest keeps accruing until it is paid off, so a longer sale costs more. |
| The program’s own backstop | The published program terms include a backup arrangement for the departing home if it has not sold inside that window. It is a condition of the program, with its own fee and its own terms, both shown in your loan terms before you commit. It is not a promise that your house sells, and it is not a price guarantee. |
What this example accomplishes
It gets you the house. That is the whole point, and it is worth saying plainly: the structure exists so that the offer in the seller’s hand does not depend on your house selling. Everything else here is the cost of that.
It also puts you in a better position on the sale. A vacant, staged home shows better than a lived-in one, you are not scheduling showings around your own family, and you are not negotiating from the weak spot of needing to close by a date somebody else set.
And it collapses one move into one move. No rental in the middle, no storage unit, no second truck.
Assumptions in this example
- The days and weeks above are an illustrative sequence, chosen to show the order of events. They are not a schedule, not a commitment, and not a typical case study. Your dates depend on your file, your seller, your escrow, and your buyer.
- The ten-day closing is the program’s published condition when the file is complete, read on the program’s own pages on September 12, 2026. It is quoted here as a condition of the program and not as a promise from Zach or from this site.
- The sixty-day sale is an assumption made up for the illustration. Nothing in the program makes a home sell in any particular number of days, and the market sets that, not the loan.
- The backup arrangement in the last row is a published program condition with its own fee and its own terms. It is disclosed in your loan terms before you commit. It is not a guarantee of a sale price and not a promise about the outcome of any sale.
- Interest, fees, and every other cost of the bridge loan are deliberately absent from this page. They are real, they depend on your loan amount and on how long the old home takes to sell, and they are disclosed to you in writing before you sign.
- Approval is not assumed. The program reviews credit, income, both properties, and the equity in the departing home, and any file can be declined.
Should I consider a different option instead?
A bridge is one way to solve this, and it is not always the one that costs least. These are the routes Zach weighs against it with your actual numbers.
Two of them have their own pages here: the home equity line that leaves your first mortgage alone, and getting cash out of your current home before it sells. That second page is the other half of this situation, written from the seller’s side rather than the buyer’s.
- Sell first, then buy, with a rent back from your buyer
- The version of this problem that costs least, if your buyer will agree to it. You sell, you keep living in the house for an agreed stretch after closing, and you shop with the proceeds already in hand. It depends entirely on a cooperative buyer and on you finding the next home inside that window.
- A home equity line on your current home, for the down payment only
- Smaller, simpler, and cheaper than a bridge, and it is a good answer when you need help with the down payment rather than a way to remove the sale contingency. It does not make your offer non-contingent, which is the difference that decides a bidding war. See the keep-your-mortgage page.
- Cash out of the current home before it closes, for the move itself
- If the real problem is money for the move, the deposit, and the two months of overlap rather than winning a bidding war, that is the sibling page on this site and usually the lighter tool.
- A conventional offer with a home sale contingency
- The normal way people move, and it costs nothing extra. In a slow market it works fine. In a competitive one it is the offer that gets passed over, which is the whole reason this page exists.
- Wait a season
- Not an answer anyone wants, and sometimes the right one. If your equity is thin or your old home sits in a soft market, waiting beats paying to carry two houses.
Questions people ask
How do I buy a house before selling mine?
Four ways: a HELOC on the home while it is listed, a bridge loan, the cash-offer program, or a contingent offer. The first three use the equity in your current home before it sells, and the program is the one built so the offer reads with no home sale contingency. The table above compares them one row each, and I help arrange the financing for the options that borrow.
How does a buy-before-you-sell program work?
A short-term loan against the home you are leaving, and the new one, lets you write an offer with no home sale contingency. You sell the old home after you move, and that sale pays the loan off. Zach places these.
What are the pros and cons of a cash offer program?
You can write an offer with no home sale contingency and no financing contingency, and you move once. You carry the loan until the old home sells, it accrues interest the whole time, and the program has its own fees. Zach shows both sides before you decide.
Is this really a cash offer to the seller?
Here is exactly what the seller gets. A contract with no home sale contingency and no financing contingency, and a closing timeline that does not depend on your house selling. For almost every seller and listing agent, that is what the phrase is shorthand for, and it is why these offers compete with buyers who are paying out of a brokerage account.
Here is what the seller does not get, and it matters that you say it accurately. The purchase is funded by a loan, not by a pile of cash sitting in your account, and a loan has to close. Zach does not buy your home and he does not buy the one you want. Anyone telling you the offer is literally cash is describing the product wrong, and describing a product wrong is its own problem under federal advertising rules.
If you are weighing a contingent offer instead, Contingent offer or cash offer: what is the difference for a buyer who has to sell? compares them, and if your contingent offers keep losing, My offer keeps losing because it’s contingent. What can I do? covers that.
Do I have to sell the old home within a set time?
You have a set window from the closing on the new home, a matter of months under the program’s published conditions, and inside it you sell on your own schedule. Zach confirms the exact window for your file. If the home has not sold by the end of it, the program’s backup arrangement applies, and Zach walks you through what that arrangement does before you commit to anything.
What is true regardless of the term: the bridge loan is outstanding until it is paid off, and its interest accrues the whole time. Selling sooner costs less than selling later. That is the plainest way to think about the deadline.
What if my old home sells for less than I expected?
Then there is less left over after the bridge is paid off. The loan is a fixed obligation and the sale price is not, so a lower price comes out of your side of the closing, not out of the loan’s.
This is why the equity question comes first and why Zach pushes on what your street is actually doing rather than what you hope it is doing. If a price drop of a realistic size would leave you short after the payoff and the selling costs, that is the signal to sell first instead. He would rather have that conversation before you write an offer than after.
Will looking into this affect my credit score?
Looking does not. A conversation with Zach is not a credit event at all.
A bridge application is a different thing, and you should expect it to be. It is a full application with a full credit report, the same as any mortgage, and it happens only when you decide to move forward. Zach tells you before any credit is pulled.
How fast does this move, realistically?
The program publishes its own timing condition, and it turns on the file being complete. Complete means income verified, the current home’s value confirmed, title clear, and the purchase contract signed. The timeline above is the program’s sequence, not a promise about yours.
Realistically, the thing that decides your timeline is how quickly you get documents back and whether the seller’s side can move at the same pace. Zach’s advice is to start the file before you write the offer rather than after. The people who close fast are the ones who were ready first.
Can I use this with my own agent?
Yes. You keep your agent on the purchase and your agent on the sale, and nothing about the financing changes who represents you or what they do. Zach is the mortgage side of the transaction, not the real estate side.
If you do not have an agent yet, that is fine too, and it is worth sorting out before you write the offer. A non-contingent offer is a real commitment, and you want someone representing you who has written one before.
How Zach thinks about this one
I like this program because it fixes a real unfairness. People who did everything right, who paid down a mortgage for fifteen years, lose houses to buyers whose money happens to be liquid that month. That is not a difference in who can afford the home. It is a difference in where the money is parked.
I have clients using this right now. That is my own statement about my pipeline, not a promise about how anybody’s file turns out, and I would rather you hear it that way.
The first question I ask is not about the new house. It is about the old one. How much equity, and how fast does your street actually move? A bridge is a bet on your old home selling in a reasonable stretch. If I think that bet is bad, I will tell you to sell first, and I have told people that.
The second thing I do is make sure you understand what you are buying. It is a loan. It costs money, the meter runs until your old house sells, and there is a program fee attached to the backup arrangement. People hear cash offer and they hear free. I would rather show you the terms and have you decide with your eyes open.
What would change my answer: thin equity in the departing home, a neighborhood where listings sit, an old home that needs work before anyone will buy it, or a budget with no room if the sale takes an extra two months. Any one of those and we look at the list above with real numbers.
Text me the two addresses. That is genuinely enough to start, and you will know quickly whether this is realistic.
Need a pre-approval letter for the new home? Get pre-approved. It starts online and uses a soft credit check only.
What will Zach ask me?
Two addresses and a rough sense of your equity gets this most of the way. Zach fills in the rest on the phone.
- The address of the home you want to buy, and where you are in the process on it.
- The address of the home you own now, what you think it is worth, and what you still owe on it.
- Whether the home you own is listed yet, under contract, or still full of your furniture.
- What you have been told about how quickly homes are moving on your street.
- When you need to be in the new home, and what is driving that date.
- Whether you already have an agent on either side of the move.
- How long you could comfortably carry both homes if the sale took longer than you hoped.
Straight answers to the questions people ask next
- Can I get a HELOC if my house is for sale?
- Can I get a bridge loan to buy a house before I sell mine?
- My offer keeps losing because it’s contingent. What can I do?
- Contingent offer or cash offer: what is the difference for a buyer who has to sell?
- Bridge loan or cash-offer program: which one fits when I buy before I sell?
- The bank declined my HELOC because my home is listed for sale. What now?
- Can I use the equity in my listed home for the down payment on my next house?
- How high can a HELOC go against my home's value?
- How do I sell my San Clemente home and buy another one here without moving twice?
Talk it through
Would rather talk it through first?
Call or text Zach directly at (949) 537-1260. This is a direct line to Zach's cell. You can text anytime, and he answers it himself when he is free. During normal business hours he is happy to take a call whenever it fits, so reach out even with a quick question.
If you would rather leave your name and number, the short form at the end of this page reaches Zach the same way. It is not an application and it does not pull your credit.
Sources and checked dates
Sources: Partner lender’s published program page (name withheld on public pages by site rule; URL in the internal research file dated 2026-09-12) (checked 2026-09-12) · Zach, September 12, 2026 (checked 2026-09-12) · Experience.com profile (checked 2026-09-24) · Confirmed by Zach, September 2026 (checked 2026-09-10) · CFPB, What you should know about Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOC) (checked 2026-09-11) · Confirmed by Zach, Sept 2026 (checked 2026-09-26).
Show each claim on this page, what it depends on, and the date it was checked (11)
| What we say, and what it depends on | Source | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| Under the bridge program Zach places, the borrower buys the new home in their own name, funded by a short-term loan secured against the current home and the new one. No company buys the home and resells it to the borrower. | Partner lender’s published program page (name withheld on public pages by site rule; URL in the internal research file dated 2026-09-12) | 2026-09-12 |
| Because the purchase is funded by that loan rather than by the sale of the departing home, the offer can be written without a home sale contingency and without a financing contingency. | Partner lender’s published program page (name withheld on public pages by site rule; URL in the internal research file dated 2026-09-12) | 2026-09-12 |
| The program’s published terms describe closings in as few as ten days when the file is complete. | Partner lender’s published program page (name withheld on public pages by site rule; URL in the internal research file dated 2026-09-12) | 2026-09-12 |
| The program’s published terms give the borrower a set window of months from the closing on the new home to sell the departing home, and include a backup arrangement covering that home if it has not sold inside that window. | Partner lender’s published program page (name withheld on public pages by site rule; URL in the internal research file dated 2026-09-12) | 2026-09-12 |
| The bridge loan is interest-bearing debt. Interest accrues until the loan is paid off, and the program charges its own fees, all of which are disclosed in the loan terms before the borrower commits. | Partner lender’s published program page (name withheld on public pages by site rule; URL in the internal research file dated 2026-09-12) | 2026-09-12 |
| Zach says he has clients using this bridge program right now. | Zach, September 12, 2026 | 2026-09-12 |
| The Experience.com profile for “Zach vonD,” West Capital Lending, displayed a 5.0 overall rating and 66 reviews, with 10 entries visible per page, when fetched live on September 24, 2026 (UTC); the page header, pagination and embedded structured data agreed, and the newest review was dated September 23, 2026. Earlier fetches: September 10, 2026 showed 63 reviews; a cached snapshot retrieved September 9, 2026 showed 52 and was marked as crawled about three months before. | Experience.com profile | 2026-09-24 |
| Zach confirms that he places HELOC financing for eligible homeowners whose homes are already listed for sale. | Confirmed by Zach, September 2026 | 2026-09-10 |
| Zach confirms that the HELOC he arranges does not require taking the home off the market, and that it can close while the home is still listed for sale. | Confirmed by Zach, September 2026 | 2026-09-28 |
| The CFPB’s HELOC booklet says: “If you sell your home, you are generally required to pay off your HELOC in full immediately. If you are likely to sell your home in the near future, consider whether or not to pay the up-front costs of setting up a line of credit.” | CFPB, What you should know about Home Equity Lines of Credit (HELOC) | 2026-09-11 |
| Zach places bridge loans for homeowners buying the next home before selling the current one. | Confirmed by Zach, Sept 2026 | 2026-09-26 |
Written for and accountable to: Zach von der Linden, Mortgage broker and Branch Manager, West Capital Lending.
Last updated 2026-10-26.
Verify him: NMLS Consumer Access, ID 1652805 · 66 reviews on Experience.com.
Sources for product claims are listed on this page, with the date each was checked.
No credit pull happens from a conversation. The options check is a soft credit pull with no impact on your credit score for the first look. Text Zach first so he can review your situation. The online check covers one HELOC program, not every option he may be able to arrange. Texts go to Zach's cell.