Selling a House for a Job Relocation: Tips, Tools, and Taxes
Packing up your belongings and starting a new life in a different state, coast, or overseas on a tight deadline is no easy task, but it’s also incredibly common. In fact, nearly a fifth of all moves are made for job-related reasons. But when you own your current home, having to sell your house for a job relocation adds a huge to-do to your moving checklist.
This guide will help you prepare for the move and anticipate what to expect from the process. We’ll cover corporate packages and relocation assistance, options for selling your house for a job relocation, and common tax questions like whether you’ll pay capital gains when you move for a job.
A quick relocation checklist
In preparing to relocate for a job, run through these related questions to make sure you have your main bases covered.
First, what’s your home worth?
Relocating for a job can mean moving sooner than intended. If you purchased the home recently, such as a year or two ago, it’s possible you haven’t built up much equity yet. (Home equity is a homeowner’s financial stake in their property that they own free of their mortgage loan obligation.)
When you sell, you’ll need to ensure that the value of your home will cover your outstanding mortgage balance in addition to selling expenses amounting to around 6%–10%. Otherwise, it’s possible that you would need to pay money at closing to settle up.
To get an idea of your financial situation and an estimate of home equity, consider plugging your address into a free online tool such as HomeLight’s Home Value Estimator.
Our tool aggregates publicly available data such as tax records, recent sales records for nearby properties, and your home’s last sale price to offer a preliminary estimate of your home’s value in under two minutes.
Although it’s not a substitute for a home appraisal or an agent’s comparative market analysis (CMA), it can be a helpful starting point in a quest to determine how much equity you have.
From there, you can input your estimated home value into our Net Proceeds Calculator to estimate the cost of selling your home and the proceeds you could earn from the sale.
We always recommend following up an online price estimate with the opinion of a top local real estate agent. If you need assistance finding an agent, HomeLight would be happy to connect you with a few highly qualified candidates in your area.
