Selling in Ottawa
If you're moving from one owned home to another, the sequence matters more than the price. Each order is a different risk — living in limbo versus carrying two homes — and the honest answer is choosing the one you can afford to have go wrong. How to line up closing dates, when a sale-of-home condition helps and when it kills an offer, and what moving between homes actually costs if the two dates do not meet.
Every move-up, move-down or move-across seller faces the same fork: sell your current home before committing to the next one, or secure the next one first. There's no universally right order — only two different sets of risks, and households better suited to carrying one than the other.
Sell first and the biggest number in your move stops being a guess: you know exactly what your home fetched and exactly what you can spend. You'll never own two homes at once, never need bridge financing, and never be forced to dump your old home at a discount because a purchase is pressing. The risk moves to the other side: if you can't find and close the right next home before your sale closes, you're moving twice — into a rental or family spare room, with your belongings in storage — and shopping under time pressure, which produces its own bad decisions.
Buy first and you move once, on your schedule, from one home directly into the next — and you can wait for the right home rather than the available one. The risk is financial: until your old home sells, you own two properties, and if your sale is slower or lower than hoped, you're funding two carrying costs and may face pressure to accept a weaker offer. Lenders will also want confidence you can carry both, at least on paper, while the overlap lasts.
A bridge loan is short-term lending that covers the gap when your purchase closes before your sale: the lender advances funds against your sold-but-not-closed home so you can complete the purchase, and is repaid from the sale proceeds. Bridges are common, useful, and not free — interest plus fees — and lenders generally expect a firm (unconditional) sale agreement on your current home before bridging. A bridge solves a dates gap; it does not solve an unsold house.
Ask one question of each order: if this goes wrong, can we absorb it? If a months-long gap in a rental would break you, don't sell first without a long closing. If carrying two mortgages for a season would break you, don't buy first without a sale condition or a very sellable home. Pick the failure you can survive, then work to make it unlikely.
Selling the family home and moving in later life is usually framed as releasing equity, and the arithmetic is less generous than people expect once transaction costs and condo fees are counted. What a move actually frees up, what adapting the home costs instead, and the City of Ottawa tax deferral that lets some owners stay put — with the 2026 thresholds stated.
The sale price is not what you walk away with. Commission and the HST on it, lawyer fees, mortgage discharge or a mortgage penalty, preparing your house for sale, moving and overlap all come off the top. Here is how to work out your net proceeds before you list — and which line regularly shocks sellers.
Before you can price my home becomes how to price it, you need a home value you can defend. How comparables — comps — actually produce a market value, why a valuation, a home evaluation and a lender's appraisal are three different things, what overpricing costs in time on market, and the best time to sell in Ottawa.
What do I pay on closing? The purchase price is only the headline number. Between the accepted offer and closing day, a cluster of hidden costs comes due — land transfer tax, lawyer fees and disbursements, title insurance, adjustments and the repair buffer nobody budgets for.
