Give the Seller Time to Accept Your Purchase Offer

When you’re buying a home in Sacramento — or anywhere else in California, for that matter — you should give the seller enough time to accept your purchase offer. This sounds like a simple concept, but it’s not. It’s more complicated than you might think. There are two things going on that affect the legality of your offer acceptance. You’ve got the time period in which the seller can accept your offer before it expires, and you’ve got the person to whom your offer needs to be delivered to be considered “in contract.”

You can easily lose a home over offer acceptance and offer delivery. In our California C.A.R. purchase contracts, this acceptance and delivery is discussed in paragraph 29. If an agent does not insert his or her name as the agent for delivery, the purchase contract is not considered delivered until the buyer receives the offer in his or her hands. If you want the deal to be done quickly — over and sealed — then the agent’s name should be noted in paragraph 29. But most important, give the seller enough time to accept the offer. Because anything can and does happen in real estate.

In the old days — the days of bellbottoms and stinky patchouli oil — agents used to write offers that expired “on presentation.” Sellers had all of 3 seconds to decide whether they wanted to accept an offer. There was no sleeping on it or I’ll get back to you. It was Take it or Leave it.

Today, we seem to be a much gentler bunch and, by default, our standard purchase contracts give sellers 3 days to ponder whether to accept, counter or ignore an offer. However, when those 3 days come and go, the purchase offer has expired. If you’re in the midst of buying a home in Sacramento, you don’t want your purchase offer to expire. Neither does the seller.

My sellers of a regular home (not a short sale) in the Sacramento area put that home on the market just before leaving for vacation. They figured this would give buyers plenty of time to view their home, without any inconvenience on the sellers’ end. The MLS comments to the buyer’s agents informed those agents that all offers would be reviewed on the day the sellers came home. That day is clearly noted in MLS.

So far, the first 5 offers will or have expired. We will be staring at expired offers when the sellers come home because the buyer’s agents did not give the sellers enough time to accept the purchase offer. Nobody read the MLS comments! If you’ve recently signed a purchase offer to buy a home in Sacramento and haven’t heard anything from your agent, read paragraph 29. Maybe your offer wasn’t rejected. Maybe it has expired.