The evening an offer arrives

The Margins

The offer comes as an email with an attachment. You open it at your own table with the kettle going on, and the first thing you want to know is whether it is a good one. Getting to that answer takes longer than reading the number at the top, and this is what fills the gap.

Nothing is an offer until it is written

A number said on the phone is a conversation. An offer is a signed document carrying dates. Until one arrives there is nothing in front of you to decide on, however warm the phone calls that week have been.

People bring a word to this part that they have heard somewhere else. Irrevocable. The Alberta contract does not use it. What it has instead is a line near the back naming the day and the hour the offer stays open for written acceptance, and after that hour it can no longer be accepted.

The hour on it goes down first

That line is the first thing written into the file, as a time rather than as a day. An offer expiring at nine tomorrow morning and one expiring at nine tomorrow night are two different evenings, and knowing which you are in decides whether you read it now or sleep on it.

Then it gets read in one order

Before a word about whether the terms are any good, the document gets checked for blanks and for arithmetic. A condition with no date filled in beside it is no condition at all. A completion day landing on a Saturday or a statutory holiday is somebody's problem later in the month. Both are cheap to find on the first read and expensive to find on the fifth day.

Then the terms, in the same order every time. Price. The deposit, how much and when it is due. The conditions and the date on each one. The completion and possession days with their times. What is included and what is excluded. Anything written into the schedules at the back. What each of those five terms actually does is a separate piece and this one assumes it.

Your part and ours

Every offer that comes in reaches you, and so does every counter. That obligation sits in the agreement you signed at the listing appointment and it also sits in the board's rules, where it holds even after you have accepted something, right through until the sale completes.

Our part is to read it line by line, say what each line does, give you a recommendation with the reasoning printed underneath it, and put the recent comparable sales beside the number so you can see how the recommendation was reached. Your part is the decision. The signature is yours and so is the number.

Four things can happen to an offer on your table. You sign it as written. You change something and send it back, which ends their offer and puts yours in its place. You say no. Or the hour passes and it expires. The last two arrive in the same spot and they say different things to the other side, so you will be told which one is happening and why.

When a second one lands

A second offer changes what everybody gets told. Under the provincial rules every offer has to reach you within two business days, and that holds even once you have accepted one, until the sale completes. Every buyer's representative has to be told there is more than one. On request, the competing representatives are given each other's names and brokerages. And where we wrote one of the competing offers ourselves, we do not present them, so another representative from the brokerage does.

None of it is a courtesy anyone extends. It is the rule every brokerage in Calgary works under, and you hear the process laid out before the offers come in instead of during.

What stays in the room is your side of it, meaning your reason for moving and the number you would actually take. A question from the other side about either one gets a strong answer with no detail in it.

Accepted is not finished

The contract's obligations begin when the accepted copy is delivered back, rather than at the moment a pen touches the page. Even then, an offer carrying conditions is a sale with outs in it. Each condition has a date beside it, and the buyer either releases it in writing by that date or the contract is undone and the deposit goes back.

So the inspection opens a second conversation about price, and it gets treated as one. You will be told the day each condition clears and the day the sale is firm, and the movers get booked after the second of those.

The part we cannot read for you is the buyer. We can tell you what their offer says about them, starting with what they conceded before you reach what they asked for. What they will do with a counter is theirs, and we will not pretend to know it in advance.

It runs the same way every time, in the same order. The reason for writing it down is that you get to read it on an ordinary Tuesday instead of on the night.

How the buyer's side writes one is in writing the offer, line by line. The standard behind the words that brought the offer is in how your listing gets written. The rest of the method is on how a Calgary home gets marketed.