Handling Contingency Clauses in Offers

You’ve been trying to sell your home for a while. The market is slow. You finally get an offer, but it has contingencies in it. What do you do? Well, the first thing to understand is a contingency is just that. It must occur before the offer is binding on the buyer. A classic contingency clause is one that says the buyer will only be bound by the offer it is making to you if the buyer sells their own home by a certain date. In a red hot market, this isn’t a big deal. In the current slow real estate market, it makes the buyer’s offer pretty much worthless. Make sure to read the contingency clauses and evaluate them carefully.