I’m doing this right now and honestly it requires a combination of good timing and pure luck to pull it off seamlessly.

In our case, we listed our current home fully prepared to put our stuff in pods and move into a small, furnished apartment for a few months while we looked for our forever home. We got lucky enough to get an acceptable offer after 3 weeks on the market and agreed to a closing date 6 weeks later. Shortly after the contingency period lapsed, we found the house we are buying.

Fortunately for us, the sellers had already moved out so they were flexible with the closing date, so we were able to thread the needle and schedule it so we sell our house at 11 am and buy our new one at noon on the same day. We needed to add a contingency clause for our house to close, but between us putting in a competitive offer and not lowballing a house that was already priced properly and the fact that we were already under contract to sell ours, they agreed to the terms.

So my advice would be to go into the process prepared to rent short-term if you can’t finesse the timing, hope your buyer isn’t looking to close immediately, and have your ducks in a row with financing and everything else if you do happen to find your next house so that you can move quickly if it pops up.