A home sale contingency makes your purchase depend on selling your current home: if your sale does not happen within the agreed period, you can withdraw under the contract’s terms rather than owning two homes or losing your deposit. It is the buyer’s seatbelt for a two transaction move, and in a competitive market like Amesbury’s, it is also the clause sellers most often ask you to give up.
How the Contingency Works
The clause sets a timeline: your home listed by a date, under agreement by a date, and closed by a date, with the seller of your new home typically keeping the right to continue marketing theirs. If a backup buyer appears, you may get a short window, often a few days, to remove the contingency and commit, or step aside. The details vary, which is why this clause lives or dies on its drafting: vague versions protect nobody and dispute well.
Why Sellers Resist It
From the seller’s chair, a home sale contingency chains their closing to a transaction they cannot see or control: your home, your buyer, your buyer’s lender. In Amesbury’s popular ranges, where several buyers compete, an offer carrying that chain starts behind offers that do not, even at the same price. Sellers accept contingencies when the field is thin, when the price compensates, or when your home is already under agreement with its own deadlines in good order.
The Alternatives Buyers Use
If you can qualify carrying both homes briefly, buying before you sell removes the contingency entirely. If your home is already under agreement, sellers read the remaining risk far more calmly, and the contingency shrinks to a closing coordination clause. Extended closing dates, larger deposits, and flexible possession terms can each buy a seller comfort that partially substitutes for the clause. The menu is negotiation, and the right combination depends on your equity, your income, and how replaceable the home you are buying happens to be.
Be honest about which risk you actually face. Buyers with a readily saleable Merrimack Valley home, strong equity, and a lender who has seen both files often do not need the formal contingency and gain real strength by omitting it. Buyers whose purchase collapses without the sale proceeds need the protection and should pay its market price knowingly rather than pretend the risk away. Either decision can be right. The wrong one is the unexamined one.
If you need to coordinate a sale with your Amesbury purchase, I will structure the contingency question honestly for your situation. Call Doherty Properties at (978) 746-0124 and ask for me, Chris Doherty.
Chris Doherty is one of the top-producing agents in the Merrimack Valley. He personally sells 100+ homes a year across Greater Lowell and the Merrimack Valley, with 3,000+ career transactions, and Doherty Properties, the company he leads, has handled over $1 billion in real estate transactions.
Doherty Properties LLC, 14 Jackson Street, Lowell, MA 01852 | 160 Main Street, Unit 7, Haverhill, MA 01830 | 4 Courthouse Lane, Suite 2, Chelmsford, MA 01824 | (978) 746-0124 | [email protected]
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