A Real Estate Sales & Purchase Agreement

Making an offer on a property

Buying a property is possibly one of the biggest financial transactions you’ll be involved in. When you are ready to make an offer, it’s important to understand as much about the process as possible.

Outlined below are some of the key points regarding this process, and we would always advise our clients to seek legal advice before making an offer on a property.

Here’s are a few FAQ’s that you should know:

  • Once we have received all of the information we need, our admin team will draft a formal agreement which we will send back through to you to review and sign. We do recommend that you seek legal advice prior to signing.

  • What you can do

    • A copy of the sale and purchase agreement is provided to your lawyer.

    • You can arrange to complete any conditions within the contract i.e. arrange for a valuation report and builder/engineer’s report if required.

    • Finalise your home loan arrangements through your mortgage broker.

    • Satisfy any other conditions within the agreed timeframes.

    What your lawyer will do during this time

    • Check the LIM, Certificate of Title, District Plan, Council rates etc.

    • Check that all of the conditions in your agreement are met.

    • Once all of this has been completed and both yourself and your lawyer are satisfied, they will advise the Sellers lawyer and the Real Estate Agent that the agreement is now unconditional.

    • Once you get to this stage, neither you nor the Seller can back out of the agreement.

    • This means that you are now required to pay to the agreed deposit amount.

    • The property will not transfer ownership until the settlement date and all funds are received by the Sellers lawyer. The Sellers lawyer will notify your lawyer once this has happened at which point the property is officially ‘settled’ and you are then the new owner of the property.

  • A multi-offer situation can occur on a property when there are multiple parties wanting to make an offer on a property, and there is no signed contract already in place.

    At any time prior to your agreement being fully signed and dated, another offer can be raised by another party, which would create a multi-offer situation. If this does happen, we will let you know immediately and explain how we handle this process.

    • You are not in a multiple offer situation until your Bayleys salesperson has advised you that there is another written offer on the property and by entering into this process we will provide you with a multiple offer form to be signed by you and returned to us.

    • Our multiple offer process will mean that all offers will be presented to the vendor at the same time and that the terms and conditions of your offer will remain confidential to you and your salesperson. Your offer will remained sealed and will only be opened in the presence of the vendor with the Sales manager, ensuring no conflict of interest exists.

    • We encourage you to enter into this process knowing that you should now make the best offer you can with terms & conditions suitable to yourself; knowing that you may not have another chance to make another or better offer.

    • The vendor may do one of the following with the multiple offers:

      • choose to accept an offer outright,

      • choose to reject all offers

      • choose to countersign one offer

      • choose to negotiate with all offers – if all offers were unsatisfactory and the vendor wanted to ask that all purchasers re-raise offers at the same time again

For further information

For further information and advice regarding purchasing a property, the government has an independent website settled.govt.nz which is an excellent resource we would encourage you to visit.