Required to Sign contract to make an offer on a property

Hi David

As Terry says, there is no requirement for a Contract to be signed to make an offer in NSW.  I suggest you submit a written offer to the Agent and explain to her/him that you understand Agents are required to submit all offers to the owner.  This approach should help the Agent understand you know the rules concerning offers – and to ease up on the BS 

Cheers,  Paul

Hi Mate,

I understood what you meant – I just couldn't believe the agent told you that.

As a side note do you know that you need to do a building and pest inspection and also have your solicitor/conveyancer review the contract?

You can certainly do this in the cooling off period but you will lose your deposit if the B & P Inspection comes back with a huge problem. It depends on where you are buying and what type of property you are buying. Just be mindful of that.

Regards

Shahin

Some agents can be absolutely ruthless and will try and will try to persuade the buyer into signing the contract by any means. 

I've had a lot of agents in NSW offering clients 5 day cooling off periods recently – which is hardly enough time to get anything done. Unless it's a sub 80% lend and there's no valuation required, chances are it's going to take a bit longer to get formal finance approval. You also need to get your building/pest inspections carried out – check over the strata minutes (if applicable), go over the contract with your legal person and perform any other final DD checks.

Cheers

Jamie

That's exactly what I'm saying, yes.

Normally it goes like this:

Make an offer, whether it be verbal, via email, or written on a piece of paper and handed to the agent.

If offer accepted, get the agent to insert your special conditions into the contract and give you a copy (a scanned and emailed copy is fine).  One such condition can be "A deposit of AUD$4000.00 is payable with 21 business days".

Get your property lawyer to look over it and give you the thumbs up

You and the vendor both sign.  Be sure that the bit that says "this offer invalid if not accepted within x days" specifies a suitably short space of time (I always do 1 day) so the risk of someone else coming in and taking the property from your control is minimized.

Once you have both signed, you would hand over a holding deposit such as $500 to the agent and get a receipt for it.

You then immediately give a copy of the signed contract to your mortgage broker (or bank if you are going direct) and also to your property lawyer.  Scanned copies are fine.

You then work your way through your special conditions, such as getting building and pest inspections.  Your lawyer will assume that if you do not contact him/her to announce you need more time for a certain condition, or wish to pull out due to a certain condition… that you are happy with everything.  Silence is considered to be "that condition is fine and ticked off."

When you get your finance approval, you would provide a copy of the approval letter to your property lawyer.

Within 21 days you need to have paid the balance of the $4k deposit (so if you already handed over $500, you hand over the remaining $3500) to the agent.  Again, get a receipt.  Scan the receipts in and send them to your lawyer together with an explanation that you have paid the deposit.

Stay in contact with your lawyer and be sure when you are both clear that the contract has "gone unconditional".  At this point you cannot get out of it.  Then there is not much else to do except sit around and wait for settlement.  Except of course ensuring that any further monies towards the deposit and stamp duty that the mortgage provider will not cover, are either paid into your property lawyer's trust account, or that you are in regular contact with your property lawyer from around 2 weeks before settlement, finding out the exact plan of how that outstanding money will be paid.  Quite often it is you scurrying around the day before settlement getting a bunch of bank cheques ready.

Does this help you? 

Which area of Sydney are you looking at?

Regards

Shahin

I guess technically they do not add conditions to the contract… technically they probably do it like this:

Print contract of sale document and my page of conditions

Scan it all in

Email to me

I show it to my lawyer before signing

I've done three this way, there has never been an issue…  My special conditions are always on an independant page.

Is there any issue you see with this Terry?