Can seller back out?.............

[nastydru]

Hello, let me get right to it. Me and my girlfriend have been looking for a place for about a month now, well we finally found the right one. We put an (formal) offer in with a 1% binders check and the seller accepted it. we got a lawyer he started drawing up the contract, did a title search and told us that we should get going with the inspection and the appraisal for the bank giving us the loan. We diid just that and everything was fine.
We signed the contract and the lawyer sent it out to the seller we didn't receive any news from the seller for about two or three days the he (the seller's attorney) called called us and said that they weren't going to sign the contracts just yet because they just received a better offer and they're going to wait to see if it pans out.

My questions is; even though they didn't sign the contract, but signed and approved our formal offer with the binders check, can they (seller) AT LEAST be held responsible for the money we spent this far trying to get this place??

Sorry for the long post. Thanks for your help. Andrew.

[Thesa]

Not sure why you would feel you had an accepted offer - or give anyone funds until you had an written acceptance.

From your post your sales are much different than here... so I am not a lot of help... your attorney would be the best person to ask these questions of.

[nastydru]

thank you for your response, I'm in New York by the way.

And here we put our offer in written form and the send it to the sellers, they then accept or counter-offer, sign the letter and send it back to the buyer (in this case me) . Then when we got ther acceptance we sent them the binder's check.

I'm sorry if I'm not being clear, but I'm trying. It's kind of getting sorted out, as of today we are getting reimbursed for all of our expenses.

[re_advice]

It depends on what was written on the check. In North Carolina there is a case where the memo stated "rest of xx property" and was signed by the buyer and cashed by the seller. Court saw that as being seen as acceptance because of the wording in the memo and the fact that there was consideration.

[jiminsd]

I think you need to look at this from a practical point of view rather than a legal one. I had a seller back out the day we were to close escrow (in California). The buyer was an attorney (again, California - the sue happy state). The seller put it up for rent with a rental agency and left for Europe to go hiking on that same day. Now the buyer/attorney made all sorts of threats but in the end they just let it go because it wasn't worth the cost or the hassle.