How long did it take to sign contract?

from what i understand the seller can listen and accept offers until both parties have signed the contract. i asked my agent if we could sign a contract contigent on an enginners report and she said you could, but it is NOT adviseable and normally a lawyer WILL NOT draw up a contract w/o an engineers report.

what assurance do we have if we hire an engineer and a lawyer that the seller will not acceept another offer? if this does occur, are we reimbursed (wishful thinking)?

i also heard that lawyers tend to drag their feet on this and it could take weeks.

any advice?

When we made our offer, we asked that the owner not show the house to anyone else. But that's really no guarantee. You just have to hope to get into contract as soon as possible. Having people walk through the house is such an intrusion, hopefully the homeowner is glad not to have to show it anymore.

Our bid was accepted in mid-November, and they finally signed the contract on Dec. 24.

Good luck!

Our offer was accepted on a Wednesday night. The realtor wrote up our offer and down payment, etc., on this one page form.

We received a draft of the contract the following Monday, and negotiated and signed everything that Friday. In between our offer and signing the contract, our Seller received 2 other offers. They didn't accept them obviously (not sure if it was because they were lower, or if they felt obligated to us). But our realtor let us know that until we signed the contract, the Seller could back out and sell to someone else at any time without liability.

We put no money down before the contract was signed, and I was my own lawyer, so we weren't worried about losing money. However as I recall, if they backed out after we paid the engineer, they would have had to reimburse us - you could definitely negotiate that and get it in writing on that one page form the realtor does.

I would not recommend signing a contract contingent upon an engineers report but technically yes, you could do it. However if I were representing the Seller, I wouldn't let them sign a contingent contract because there would really be no benefit and no point to it from the Seller's point of view.

we signed within 2 weeks of an accepted offer. We had an inspection within a few days. It could have happened faster but the seller's lawyer was SLOW.

Its a bit nervewracking - there was even an open house AFTER we had an accepted offer cause it was already published...