We did something similar, but found our house and then made our offer conditional on the sale of our gold house. For some reason, realtors seem to not like to do this, but it went very smoothly in our situation. It also helped that the house we were selling was in a fairly hot market and we understood how to price it correctly. Obviously, it adds some more complications to the whole process, but it did work for us. We were prepared to carry both mortgages if the sellers of the house we bought balked at the condition though.
One other thing I would really recommend is finding the house you want first. I have many people I know that have sold first and then ended up settling for something that was good enough.
And lastly, staging makes a huge difference especially depending on the size of your house. I was amazed how big and open the staging made our old house feel. Just for comparison sake, a family member and I sold houses on the exact same street one month apart. The properties were essentially identical. We used a stager, spent one full day and about $200 preparing for the sale. They spent over a month and over $5K preparing for their sale and did not use a stager. Ours sold in 5 days and theirs took almost a month to sell.
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