Experience with a Contingent contract....

mrjk322

We have had our house on the market for a little over a month.  We had someone through 2 Sat ago and they loved the house and told our RE that we should expect an offer, however, it will be contingent on the sale of their current home.  We are still waiting for the offer.  The woman just got divorced and had her home up for fsbo.  She wants us to know she is serious about getting her home to sell but she hasn't listed with an agent yet.  Our RE told us that the woman is on vacation and that she plans on having a meeting on Wednesday and that there is a good chance that an offer will be coming in on Wednesday night.

Any tips, advice, experience with dealing with a contingent contract based on sale of home?

lil_jen051708

Your realtor should be able to help you but I have a few thoughts: make sure you are still able to keep the house on the market.  If you get another offer the contingent offer (this lady) may have 24 hours to pull her contingency or you could accept the new offer.  Make sure you are fine with this. Also, I've known sellers to put a specific number of days in the offer: "you have 90 days to sell your home or the contract is void". 

 You are in the drivers seat so make sure you are comfortable with all the terms.  Good luck!  

Santorini2011

My first instinct is to not take it.  Two reasons: 1. she is doing a FSBO.  These tend not to sell as quickly and she prob won't know what to do if things get sticky. You might not get your sale b/c she'll screw something up with her sale.  2. Depending on your market, it might take an eternity for her place to sell.

Another consideration, is her ex-husband on the mortgage?  That could mean an even more drawn out ordeal.

I would wait. It has only been a month. Sorry.

rsd12

The house we just moved into had this contigency and we would not even look at it. As well as, we would not take any offers for our old house with this contigency. We had to sell since we were moving out of state and my husand was already working/livving there. It is a good thing too, our buyer newly divorced was trying to sell her house and her buyers fell through. But she did not need the sale to buy. She ended up closing a month after ours went through on her old house. In addition, we knew our sellers had to sell and we put in the offer that it was NOT contigent upon them finding a new house. They agreed. Their first house fell through as well, but they had to find something. Fortunately everything worked out well for all parties and we closed on our original close date with our sellers too! I would not do it, but it depends on how much time you have. Our buyer (suprisinly not us), kept on requesting to push back our close date due to her contracts. It actually did benefit us as we had started to look at short term housing sine we were not finding anything in our new area.