The Move-Up Playbook.

Sell first or buy first.

Every other decision in the move-up flows from this one. Here's the honest case for each side, without the sales pitch.

There is no universally right answer. There is a right answer for your cash position, your risk tolerance, and your market. The mistake is not picking one. Buyers who drift into the process end up making this call under pressure, in the middle of an escrow, at the exact moment it's most expensive to be wrong.

There's a third lane: run both at once. List your home and shop simultaneously, then tie the two escrows together so they close in sequence. It takes more coordination and a listing agent and lender who actually talk to each other, but when it lands, you get sell-first pricing with buy-first certainty. That's the version most of my move-up clients end up running, and it's why the lender conversation should happen before the listing goes live, not after.

The equity math.

Zillow tells you what the house is worth. It doesn't tell you what you'll walk away with. Those are very different numbers.

Here's the walk-through I do with every move-up client, using round numbers. Say the current home is worth $950,000 and the mortgage payoff is $430,000. On paper, that's $520,000 of equity. On paper.

Now subtract the cost of selling. Agent compensation (negotiable, and worth negotiating), escrow and title, transfer taxes, the pre-listing touch-up, and whatever credits the buyer's inspection shakes loose. All-in, plan on roughly 6 to 8 percent of the sale price. At 7 percent, that's $66,500. Your $520,000 just became about $453,500.

That $453,500 is your real budget for the next move, and it has to cover three jobs: the down payment, closing costs on the purchase (plan 2 to 3 percent), and the cash cushion the lender wants to see left over after closing. Chapter 06 covers that last one, because at higher price points it stops being optional.

One more line for the spreadsheet: if the home was your primary residence for two of the last five years, current federal law lets most sellers exclude up to $250,000 of gain from capital gains tax, or $500,000 filing jointly. Above that, there can be a tax bill. I'm not your CPA, so before you bank on a number, run it by one. I can loop mine in if you don't have one.

The point of this chapter is one sentence: price the next house off your net proceeds, not your Zestimate. The buyers who skip this step are the ones who end up $80,000 short three weeks before closing, and every fix available at that point costs money.

Buying before you sell.

Your down payment is trapped in the house you still live in. Four ways to get it out early, and what each one costs.

Everything in this chapter exists to solve one problem: the money you need for the next house arrives at the close of a sale that hasn't happened yet. If you have enough savings to close without touching your equity, skip ahead. Everyone else, this is the chapter.

The contingent offer.

"We'll buy yours once ours sells" is either a reasonable ask or a dead offer. The difference is how you build it.

A contingency tied to your sale comes in two flavors, and sellers price them very differently. A home-sale contingency means your house isn't in escrow yet. You're asking the seller to take their home off the market while you find a buyer for yours. In any competitive situation, that offer loses to a clean one, and it should.

A settlement contingency means your house is already in escrow and just needs to close. Now you're asking the seller to accept a scheduling dependency, not a marketing gamble. Listing agents read these completely differently. If you can enter the conversation with your sale under contract, your "contingent" offer is 80% of the way to clean.

Here's the lever most buyers never use: get pre-approved to carry both payments even if you never intend to. When your offer says "contingent on sale, but the buyer qualifies to close regardless," the contingency stops being a financing risk and becomes a courtesy. That letter costs you nothing. I write them regularly, and listing agents call me to verify them, which is the actual point.

Above the conforming line.

At LA County prices, plenty of move-up loans cross a line most buyers have never heard of. Here's the line, and what's actually on the other side.

Every year the federal government sets a ceiling on the size of loan that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are allowed to buy. Loans under the ceiling are called conforming, and they're the standardized product most of the market runs on. In 2026, that works out to three bands for a single-family home in LA County:

Now the word: a loan above that ceiling is called a jumbo loan. That's the entire definition. It's not a different kind of debt, not a penalty, not exotic. It just means the loan is too big for Fannie or Freddie to buy, so a bank holds it itself. And because the bank is keeping it, the bank checks harder.

What "checks harder" means in practice: credit score expectations move up (720+ gets the good shelf), down payments start around 10 to 20 percent, debt-to-income tolerances tighten, documentation gets fussier, and the lender wants to see real cash left over after closing. Sometimes a second appraisal on bigger loans. None of it is unreasonable. It's just underwriting done by someone who can't pass the risk along.

Two things buyers get wrong here. First, the rate myth: jumbo rates are often right on top of conforming rates, and at times better, because banks compete hard for exactly this client. Don't assume a penalty. Second, the band is about the loan, not the price: a $1.4 million purchase with $450,000 down is a $950,000 loan, which is high-balance conforming, not jumbo. Down payment size can move you between rulebooks, and that's a lever we can pull on purpose.

One more nuance worth knowing exists: the loan amount can be structured. Where the math favors it, we can split the financing so the first mortgage stays inside the conforming ceiling with a second piece behind it. Sometimes that wins, sometimes one clean jumbo wins. That's a pricing exercise, not a philosophy. I run both and show you the comparison.

Reserves and structure at higher price points.

Above the million mark, the approval question quietly changes from "can you make the payment" to "what happens if life happens."

Reserves are months of your full housing payment (principal, interest, taxes, insurance, HOA) sitting in accounts after the closing wires clear. On a standard conforming loan, the requirement is often minimal. Above the ceiling, most lenders want 6 to 12 months, and the number grows with the loan size.

What counts: checking, savings, brokerage accounts, and usually retirement accounts at a discount, since the lender knows you'd pay penalties to reach that money. What this means for planning: the cash you walk away with in Chapter 02 has to cover the down payment, closing costs, and the cushion. Buyers who spend every dollar getting to 20 percent down sometimes fail approval on the account balance they have left. That surprise is avoidable a year in advance and painful three weeks before closing.

Structure is the other half. The down payment number isn't sacred: sometimes 20 percent down with thin reserves is a worse file than 15 percent down with a year of cushion, and I'll tell you which one you are. Credits can be negotiated from the seller (very negotiable on new construction) or taken from the lender in exchange for a slightly higher rate, and both can fund the buydown or the closing costs when cash is the constraint.

And for buyers whose wealth outruns their W-2, self-employed owners in a reinvestment year, retirees, anyone whose tax return understates reality: there are programs that qualify you on liquid assets or business cash flow instead of the tax return. That's its own guide (the self-employed one), but know the door exists before you assume the answer is no.

The new-construction play.

The hardest part of the move-up is timing. A house that takes months to build hands you the timeline for free.

Think about what actually makes the move-up hard: two transactions fighting over the same 30-day window. Now put a new build in the picture. You contract today on a home that won't be finished for months. Suddenly there's no scramble. You list your current home when the build schedule says to, not when panic says to. You sell once, move once, and walk from one keyset to the other.

Santa Clarita and north LA are full of communities built for exactly this buyer, and builders are structurally friendlier to move-up sequencing than resale sellers: many will accept contracts from buyers who still need to sell, because the build timeline absorbs the contingency. Some builder purchase agreements handle it formally, others informally. It's negotiated per community, which is a thing I do.

Now the part most loan officers won't say out loud. If the builder's in-house lender is offering a big bundled incentive, I usually can't beat it, and I won't pretend otherwise. Those incentives are real money and sometimes they're the right call. What I am is the free second read: I'll price the builder's offer against the open market, tell you in writing when their deal wins, and check whether any of the incentives survive using an outside lender. You lose nothing by knowing.

One more hat: I'm also a licensed California real estate salesperson, and I represent new-construction buyers across Southern California. The builder's sales office works for the builder. I can be the person at the table who works for you, and it costs you nothing, because the builder pays the commission. The catch is timing: most builders require your representative to be registered on or before your first visit. Bring me before you tour, not after.