Selling a home has several steps in the process, and while getting an accepted offer is certainly a very important step, it’s also not the last. Once your offer is accepted, there are normally a series of conditions that need to be met before the offer is changed to ‘firm’ and even then, it’s not officially ‘sold’ until you’ve sat down at the notary to sign the deeds.
Today, we’ve got a question that I hear all the time: “Once I have an accepted offer, how long does it take to go through all my conditions?”
As you can imagine, there’s no one right answer, but I’ll walk you through the most common conditions and timelines. That way, you get a better understanding of how long the process would usually take.
What’s a condition?
So first off, let’s just clarify what I mean by condition. When we make an offer on a home, there are a couple of conditions that are added to the offer that need to be completed and fulfilled before the offer becomes firm and final.
Financing
The first notable condition that we often see is financing, when the buyer is taking a loan or mortgage with the bank. Their mortgage broker or bank may give them a pre approval letter to give them an idea of how big of a loan they’re willing to give you to buy your home, but they won’t finalize the mortgage approval until they know which home they’re lending the money to buy.
In most cases, the bank is going to send an appraiser to the home to check its value. And then there are a number of internal steps that’s complete before they finally approved the mortgage. This process usually takes about 14 days, but mainly due to the pandemic, things have actually been much more delayed.
On the other hand, if the offer that you’ve received is a cash offer, this can be closed as quickly as within 24 hours.
Inspection
The next condition we see often is for building inspection. Depending on the availability of their preferred inspector, this usually takes anywhere from 5 to 14 days to get the inspection done and the report completed.
Other conditions
While financing and inspection are the most common conditions, there are a few others that can sometimes be added to an offer: water test, chimney inspection, review of documents, or septic inspection–just to name a few. But because they can be completed in the same timeframe as the inspection and financing, these generally don’t add to the total amount of time it takes to fulfill the conditions.
Selling another home
The condition to sell another home can be used by the buyer when they have to sell their current home first before being able to complete the purchase of yours.
In this case the buyer and seller agree on a timeframe that the seller is willing to wait in order for the buyer to sell their home. Normally these are 30 to 45 days, but in special cases it can be longer or shorter.
It’s worth noting that in today’s market, sellers aren’t willing to wait as long. Meaning that if you have the condition to sell your home first, this may hurt your chances of having your offer accepted by the seller.
Done, and done
Only once all the conditions of the offer are completed, the sale is now considered firm. All you have to do is go to the notary appointment and sign the deed of sale and it’s complete.
This is #AskPete. If you have any real estate questions, feel free to send them and I will get you the answers. Or stay up to date on the latest tips for real estate buyers and sellers by clicking the YouTube button below: