Contract terms - what you need to know

Real Estate is one of the most heavily regulated industries in British Columbia. With such heavy regulations comes a mountain of forms, disclosures and reporting to brokerages every step of the way. A Real Estate transaction is fairly straightforward, but what controls and dictates your protection as a buyer, is what gets carefully and expertly placed into the terms and conditions of the contract. This section of the contract of purchase and sale is customizable, and can dictate the actions that follow once an offer is submitted. 

Typically speaking, a buyer would either submit an offer with subject conditions, or without. An offer to purchase without conditions means the buyer and their agent are confident that the buyer’s financing, a property inspection and any other pertinent requirements to ensure the buyer is confident with their decision to purchase can be waived up front, making the offer ‘clean’ to the potential seller. An offer with subjects allows a buyer a specific amount of time to do their due diligence, which can include completing an inspection, securing their financing, reading through any strata documents, and acquiring any further information they may need to be satisfied with their findings to remove subjects and complete the sale.  

Once the subject conditions have been satisfied (or immediately following an accepted offer with no subjects) and the deposit has been paid, the offer is now considered a firm sale. What happens next is determined by the clauses that have been included in the contract – the ‘terms’. Although each home purchase is unique and requires specific terms, we still recommend the following basic terms for each purchase contract:

Allowing our clients in for measurements -We suggest allowing our clients in twice before the completion date to view their new home, with lots of notice of course. Sometimes during the purchase process, especially in a market like we’re seeing now, buyers have had limited time to properly view the home. This allows our clients to spend a bit more time, take some measurements and even have contractors meet them for quotes if renovations are in the cards. 
Professional cleaning -We’ve been in the business a long time. We’ve seen some things. Adding this term helps to make sure sellers will be taking care of any junk removal, cleaning, carpet cleaning, etc. before our clients take possession of their home.  
Appliances in good working condition -We want to make sure our clients don’t move in and things aren’t working as they should be. 
At least two sets of keys, FOBS, garage door openers, mail keys, etc. - There’s nothing worse than having movers waiting outside and not being able to open your garage because you don’t have the opener! We want to make sure that access to our clients’ new home will be seamless.  

We also make sure we’re in contact with the listing agent, communicating up until possession day to take care of any loose ends before closing. We have a full arsenal of service professionals who can help us with any issue that might arise, but we definitely like to tackle these before our clients move in so they have less to worry about and can just enjoy their new home. 
We love creating amazing home buying experiences for our clients! If you haven’t experienced what we do, we’d love to show you.