Real Estate is local

The longer I'm in the business and the more I interact with colleagues around the country, the more I find that the way real estate is bought and sold is truly a local phenomenon. Of course, each state has its own licensing rules, but even the way real estate agency is practiced and how contracts are presented and the protocol for getting property transferred from the seller to the buyer can be very different in New Jersey than in New Mexico or even in New York or Connecticut.

I'll be posting only about how things are handled in residential real estate sales in New Jersey, although I might bring in information from other states to contrast. You can also narrow down my posts to relate to Northern and Central NJ, where most buyers and sellers are represented by attorneys. (In South Jersey it works differently.)

I'm not an attorney and I'm not going to give legal advise; I'm just going to comment about things I've observed while selling a few hundred houses over the last 20 years. These are things that have surprised both me and my clients over the years.

Contract closing dates are like stop signs... In NJ, they sometimes seem to be mere suggestions. (If you've driven here, you'll know what I mean.) Regardless of what date it says in the contract that both buyers and sellers have signed, obviously some very important items have to be completed first. The biggest item is making sure the money is there in time, but there are other certificate of occupancy and title items that sometimes hold things up. There IS usually verbiage in the contract that if it doesn't close "on or before" the date on the contract, any date acceptable to everyone is okay too. Unfortunately for the sellers and the buyers who are trying to plan for movers and perhaps trying to coordinate another closing on another property, it's more of the exception than the rule that the date gets moved around.