Buying a home is one of the most significant investments the average person makes during their lifetime. You spend hours searching through real estate listings trying to find the perfect home for you and your family. You take the time to thoroughly research the neighborhoods you’re considering moving to. And, of course, you take the time to negotiate the best possible price. But even with all the effort, research, and planning that goes into choosing the right home, there’s still a good chance that you won’t stay in your home forever. So, what are some of the most common reasons people decide to sell their homes?
It’s No Longer a Comfortable Size
It’s not at all unusual for first-time homebuyers, particularly younger single people and newlyweds, to buy smaller two-bedroom homes and later sell it as they have children and outgrow their homes. But in many cases, homeowners decide to sell because their home has become too big for their needs. This often happens when the homeowner gets close to retirement age and their kids have grown up and moved out on their own, leaving extra bedrooms sitting empty and unused. Not only do they have too much space around the house, larger homes are more expensive to heat and cool and can require more maintenance than the homeowner is willing or able to put in.
Job Changes
While some people will spend much of their lives working for the same company, many others will work at lots of different places over the course of their careers and those jobs might not all be in the same general area. They may get transferred to a different location, have the opportunity to take their dream job in a different state, or just get a new job that’s located a bit further away than they’d like to commute to every day.
Changes in Health and Lifestyle
Over time, it’s only natural for our lifestyles to change and sometimes, you might have to sell your home to keep up with those changes and live comfortably. For example, if you and your spouse bought a small starter home when you first got married, you may not have been thinking about what the schools in the neighborhood were like. But now that you have children, you want to move to a home in a better school district. Or as people age, they might have a harder time climbing stairs and want to move to a smaller one-story home so they can have full access to their home.
Changes in the Neighborhood
When you moved into your home, there’s a good chance that one of the things that really sold you on it was the neighborhood. Maybe you loved things like the location, how safe it was, your neighbors, or the businesses it was close to. But neighborhoods often change over time. Those neighbors you loved may have moved away, the crime rate went up, or the businesses you liked to visit closed up shop. But not everybody who decides to sell their home because of changes in the neighborhood does so because the area changed for the worse. Sometimes, a neighborhood can improve to the point that property values have gone up significantly since you moved in. In this case, selling your home because it’s become so valuable can be a very attractive idea.
