Incredibly helpful to have buffer days if you can manage it. A very short rent-back agreement for a few days smooths out a lot.

Yeah, create overlap in some fashion. Anything with zero margin is error prone.

I agree and definitely makes things easier. The other way is like in England where it's common for the entire chain to exchange contracts on moving day. Means anything can go wrong right up until the last minute, but if it does at least you still have your things in your house. Maybe the US is more like Scotland where contracts are exchanged ahead of time.

We sucked up an extra month's rent to have overlap on our move just across a small metro area to the older house we'd bought, and it was worth every penny - we had time to repaint some walls and refinish the living room floor before our furniture was moved in (local moving services in Germany are quite different from the nightmares I'm hearing about here)