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How To Make The Most Of A Contingent Offer You Receive

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One of the most exciting days when selling a house is the day you receive a call from your real estate agent telling you that someone made an offer on your house. When you receive this offer and read through it, you might have some questions if the offer includes a contingency to sell their house, and you might be leery to accept an offer like this. If you receive this type of offer, here are several things you should know about responding to it and making the most of it.

What it means

The first thing to understand is what a contingency to sell means for you as the seller of a house. When a buyer writes you an offer to buy your house with a sale contingency on the offer, it means that they are saying they want to buy your house but cannot until they sell their house. This means that you would have to wait for the buyer to first sell their home before they could proceed with buying yours. If the person never sells his or her home, the deal to buy your house is off.

You should include a notice to perform in your counteroffer

If you receive an offer like this and do not want to tie up the sale of your house for weeks or months, you could either put a deadline on the contingency or you could add a notice to perform. Putting a deadline on it means that you are accepting the offer for a certain amount of time, such as 30 or 60 days. During this time, you will not accept other offers from other people who might be interested in buying your house, but the deal would be off if the buyer could not sell his or her home within the deadline.

The other option is putting a notice to perform on the counteroffer. This basically means that you are accepting the offer, but you also have the right to keep showing your house and accepting other offers. If you happen to get another offer, the original buyer would still have the first chance to buy the house, but he or she would have to go through with the purchase immediately and remove the contingency to sell from the deal. If the buyer cannot do that, you could void that deal and sell your house to the other buyer.

If you are in this position and receive this type of offer, make sure you talk it over with your agent to learn about all your options. If you want to sell your home, contact a real estate agency.


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