HFordy

Thinking ahead a few years, but how did people coordinate selling their UK home with a move to NZ?

We are hoping to move in 2023 with a 4 year old and a 2 year old (😩). We have a house to sell. What did everyone do between selling and moving? We don’t have any relatives nearby with space for a family of 4 to stay for any length of time. Is Airbnb an option? Hire a caravan? Short term furnished rental? We hope to ship out a lot / most of our furniture and belongings.

Just wanted to know now how anyone who has done it managed to juggle everything!

Justcol

We simply negotiated a price with the buyers. They saved a little and we kept the house until a specific date.

jarv5116

I would keep my house in the UK and rent it out for a period.
Then when I know I'm settled in an area in NZ I want to live and enjoy living in NZ. I would sell it.

carcajou

Yes - for sure. Rent it out the first year or two until you are sure the move is going to work out, and then sell it.

It is easy to get caught up in the excitement of the move and positive attitude and all that but migrating is one of the hardest things you will ever do and the failure rate can be high. Keeping the safety net in place for a year or two is sensible.

escapedtonz

We emptied the house a month before we migrated and shipped it all to NZ.
We then moved in to a furnished holiday rental for 2 weeks and spent a week doing the house up prior to it being rented out. When it was ready we just handed the keys over to a rental management company and left it to them.
We then flew out a week later landing in NZ about a month before our container arrived. We rented the house out for 3 years and eventually sold it to the tenant then used the money to buy and build in NZ.

Thorners

We sold our place last October and moved into a rental here in London for a year. The logistics of selling and moving at the same time seemed too stressful!

of course our plan to move this Oct might be scuppered now, hopefully not.

shuvit

We (Myself and children ages 4,5&6) moved over in October 2017, husband moved over in July 2017 due to work....
Anyway, I put the house on the market in the July, first viewing went well, had a chat during the viewing and explained we were moving away and looking to sell and in my mind I was going to rent a property between the sale of the house and the date I had in mind, so anyway the guy offered the asking price and said he would stall the sale of the house for a couple of months which meant I would not have to rent - we were very lucky/he was very desperate
I then arranged the movers to come to us in the beginning of August to pack our belongings, 20ft container filled to the max, house sale completed and we stayed in my mums for a week as a kind of a little holiday for the kids before we went. We only waited 4 days for our container to arrive and unloaded in our NZ home (12 weeks plus 2 days since our home was packed). Everything just slotted into place. I know we were very lucky, but if you plan ahead things work out
Good luck x

Bo-Jangles

I think ideally, if you are hellbent on selling (you don't have to and could rent it) you just have to concentrate on getting a firm offer on the house and get it sold asap without worrying about the consequences of what you will do next. You need to be flexible, you will have cash in hand and ability to rent or stay somewhere in the UK in the meantime, have a long holiday on the way to NZ, stay in in an Air BnB, caravan, camp out with rellies and do whatever it takes depending on how long until you travel. Being dependent on all stars and moon being aligned to sell a house in the exact time frame you want is just going to lead to additional stress.