What a home sale contingency does
and what it does not protect.
A home sale contingency makes your purchase conditional on selling the home you own. The standard New Jersey addendum lets the seller keep marketing, and a competing offer starts a short clock.
- A home sale contingency makes your purchase conditional on selling the home you already own
- Under the state addendum the seller can keep marketing the property while your contingency is in place
- When another offer comes in you generally have two business days to waive in writing and show you can close without the sale
Explainer. Written by The JK Realty Group.
A home sale contingency is a clause that makes buying the next house conditional on selling the one you are in. It is the ordinary answer for an owner whose down payment is sitting in their current home, and it is written into the contract as an addendum rather than assumed. Without it, you are committing to close whether or not your own house sells.
What surprises most buyers is the part that is not protection. The standard New Jersey addendum lets the seller keep the property on the market while your contingency is in place. You are under contract, and they are still showing. If another offer arrives that the seller wants, they can put you on notice, and from that point you generally have two business days to waive the contingency in writing and show you are able to close without selling first.
Say you write on a house in Gloucester County with the contingency in place, and eleven days later a second buyer offers. Your two business days start. Waiving means proving you can close anyway, usually with a bridge loan already lined up or funds that do not depend on the sale. If you cannot, the contract ends and you get your deposit back, which is the protection working as intended. That timeline is an illustration; what your own contract says governs.
The practical version is that the contingency is worth having and it is not a reservation. The buyers it works best for have their own home listed, priced and moving before they write, so the two day question has an answer ready rather than being asked cold.
What to ask, and who answers it: your agent can tell you how a sale contingency reads to a listing agent in your price band, and how to sequence the listing and the offer so the two do not fight. Your attorney is the one who reviews the addendum itself and what waiving would commit you to. Your lender is the one who tells you whether bridge financing is realistic for you.
Our take
The contingency protects you from owning two homes, and it costs you exclusivity, since the seller keeps showing. If you need to sell before you buy, the question to settle early is what you would do on the day that two day clock starts.
Need to sell before you buy? Let's talk.
The timeline in the example is illustrative. What your own contract and addendum say governs, and contract questions belong with your attorney. General information, not advice about any specific property. The JK Realty Group, brokered with OMNI Real Estate Professionals. Equal Housing Opportunity. See our Terms of Use for how we source and credit these posts.