Talk to me about renting back to the seller...

[Bonita]

vs. delaying closing?

Our realtor notified us yesterday that the seller would like more time (originally set to close beginning of July, so now we're looking at end of July), and he mentioned that we could still close and she would pay us rent.

My question is - is it better to close and have her pay us rent, or just delay closing? 

[kaylie]

Personally, I would rather not do a rent-back because it seems like there would be more risk of complication. I do know people who have done it without a problem though. Have you locked your interest rate yet? I'm pretty sure rates can only be locked for 60 days, so I would talk to your mortgage person to get their thoughts on whether or not that's an option.

[cajungal]

We rented back from the buyers of our last house. It seemed to work out well for everyone. We rented back for three weeks, and the cost of rent was outlined in our contract.

[hol]

I asked this a few weeks ago, some more responses...

pandce.proboards.com/post/2957733/thread

* added new link

[candreco]

It worked for us to rent back for a month because the sellers couldn't get out of their lease any earlier, we requested it because we had offers the day we put the house on the market and hadn't offered on another house yet. We found our new home and went under contract about two weeks later, and closed fast on that, so we actually didn't use the whole month.

The contract specified that we would retain occupancy for 30 days after closing, and would pay $1000/day rent after that, so it's not like we were going to hang around indefinitely. There was also a second walk-through to verify that the house was in the same condition after we moved out that it had been in at closing. This seemed to be pretty standard to the REAs and the lawyer at closing.