How long is reasonable to wait for vendor to accept or decline offer?

Hi all,

On Saturday we submitted a contract with an offer, along with at least one other party. The vendor will select one (or none) and we move on with our lives. But apparently one of the vendors is traveling overseas and is unable to sign off for whatever reason, so we're all in limbo until they get around to it.

During this phase I'd be assuming the agent is doing their best to round up more competing offers, and the home is open again this weekend. Meanwhile we're unable to make offers on other properties because of this partially signed contract. How long is reasonable to wait to hear an outcome in a situation like this? Is it a standard practice for vendors to hold onto offers for several days hedging that a better one might come along (especially if the open home goes ahead), or do these things usually happen pretty quickly? Am I being impatient?

 

Thats why you should put in an expiry on it.

 

I always put a deadline on offers. Otherwise you're a lamb to the slaughter.

 

I always put a deadline of no more than 24 hours on offers.

 

pfff travelling overseas. They have printers and scanners and computers and email "overseas".

 

They could also get their solicitors to sign on their behalf or should of organised someone else to sign on their behalf.

Wait as long as you want - should of put an expiry but keep looking and before you put an offer in on another property withdraw your offer on this place.

I would say your offer wasn't acceptable or was worse than the others and they are proceeding or negotiating with the other offer. However I don't have any information but my gut feeling as I certainly don't know the situation you or your offer is.

 

This is why you prepare your game plan before even looking at a property.

 

The number of times I have had to explain to selling agents that the offer will not remain valid indefinitely, and that the travelling vendor could easily get things printed, signed, scanned and emailed at a Post Office or Officeworks or Library or Internet Cafe is astonishing. This push is often necessary.

 

This is what I'd be doing.

I know it can be difficult to apply a firm deadline if you have a strong emotional attachment with a property (I've been there too!) - but 24 hours should suffice no matter where in the world one of the other parties are.

Allowing more time is likely just to benefit everyone else.

Cheers

Jamie

 

Thanks everyone, I'll set the expectation with the agent. Lesson learnt.

 

We had an agent leave us hanging for at least 3 to 4 days while he was trying to play our offer to get other higher offers. In the end he got an offer a couple of grand higher than us while we were having sleepless night as we were already emotionally attached. What made it worse was that we had a dud BA working on our behalf

 

Just to wrap this up, as soon as we put a deadline on the agent contacted us with a counter-offer, which we declined. But before our offer expired, the vendor agreed to our initial offer so it ended up OK in the end. Lucky for us they didn't get any better offers within that timeframe, and it won't happen again!

 

Congratulations you got the house and learned a lesson for next time.