If you're not picking up a house at auction, then you're likely putting in a conditional offer. Conditional offers make up the bulk of sale and purchase agreements, and they're termed that because there are obligations - "conditions" - that both parties will have to fulfil before settlement can take place.
Conditional offers are best made through your legal representation. This is because you have to ensure that the wording of your conditions protects your interests, and your lawyer will be familiar with this process and how to have the right conversation with the vendor's lawyer.
A general rule of thumb for conditions is that in order to protect your interests, they will be:
Specific
Have a time limit
Clearly state what happens if they aren't fulfilled
While you can make more than one conditional offer at a time, you should be careful when you're doing this. If you can reasonably fulfil a condition, then you have a legal impetus to because of the sale and purchase agreement that you've signed. You might think that you're playing it safe by offering on two properties in case one doesn't come through for you, but it can often be the opposite.
Conditions are also a two-way street: each condition that you have to protect your rights is technically a deadline that the other party in the transaction has to wait for before settlement can progress. Vendors will prefer unconditional offers to conditional ones so that they have fewer hoops to jump through, so keep that in mind as well.
As we've said, conditional offers are the norm for negotiated contracts, so don't at all feel like you're disadvantaging yourself by putting one in for your dream home. You're making a huge financial investment, so allowing your lawyer the time to do due diligence and yourself the time to get finance together are crucial parts of the process no matter how you decide to proceed.
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