Good afternoon and welcome. This is Nolan with Discover NC Homes and Nolan’s news. And as always, thank you for having me. Today I wanted to talk about the danger of putting instead of hard dates in a contract for due diligence and closing, days from acceptance.

So there’s two areas in a contract where we put dates in, we put them on a due diligence date, and a closing date.

Acceptance as defined in a contract is the last day that the buyer or the seller has signed the contract. So if it was signed on Friday at five o’clock, acceptance would be Friday at five o’clock.

So oftentimes in the contract we lose, without a hard date in there, we lose sight of what that date might be. And obviously some months are shorter or longer than others. Some months we have 28 days, some months we have 30 or 31 days.

So if a data is put in there and it’s days from acceptance, sometimes we can lose track of that. Sometimes it could be the broker on the listing side or the broker on the buyer side, or the buyer gets confused on a 30 day month, and it might be 31 days.

The reason I’m talking about this is because it’s happened a few times to us where a due diligence date has passed and the buyer broker has thought it’s one date and the listing broker has thought it’s another date.

So my point here is, when you’re doing a contract, make sure you put a closing date and a due diligence date of 4/15 or 4/30 instead of 15 days from acceptance or 30 days from acceptance. It eliminates any confusion in the contract. It gives you concrete dates to work off of, and then a date doesn’t get missed.

And again, oftentimes when earnest money is out there and you pass that due diligence state, that money becomes nonrefundable. So if one party is thinking one thing and the other party is thinking another day, because that 30 days from acceptance or the word acceptance has been used and not a hard date, it gets very confusing.

If you have any questions, please reach out to me, let me know. And as always thank you for having us.

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About Nolan Formalarie

Nolan Formalarie has been in the North Carolina Real Estate Industry for over 8 years and enjoys every minute of it. He is involved in every aspect of the industry including selling and purchasing residential property, home watch services, property management, association management and construction.