[Dueller]

I had a somewhat similar situation on my current house. We were in a situation where there were multiple bidders within 4 days of the property being listed. We offered near full asking price with no contingencies and a larger than normal earnest money deposit and a quick closing date. They accepted our offer over another slightly higher offer because the other offer had a sale of home contingency.

We really needed to sell our existing house before closing but knew the market was softening so we arranged a bridge loan just in case.

as luck would have it we had a pretty quick offer on our house...BUT that deal fell thru 14 days before we were to close on the new house. I figured up what the bridge loan would cost us and called one prospect thathad looked at our house and was interested but didn't make an offer. I made her an offer she couldn't refuse by dropping our asking price and throwing in a lot of concessions. Only catch was we had to close in 11 dyas. Since she worked for a mortgage broker, she was able to put it together and we had a simultaneous closing.

End result: we got the house we wanted, sold our house instead of having to get a bridge loan, saved us the expense of the bridge loan, buyer of our house got a great deal, and everybody lived happily ever after.

My thoughts are if you can, get a bridge loan approved as a backup, agressively market your house (perhaps concentrate on sweetening the pot for prospective buyers of your house as opposed to the one you want), go in with as few contingencies on the purchase as possible. If you canafford $3K a month for the option on the new house you certainly can afford interest on a 90-180 day bridge loan.

YMMV