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One of the three houses that I am about to see with my realtor pop up with "active with contract" sign. What would you do? My first reaction was let's wait it out this contact, not to initiat a bidding war but I have no idea about the nature of the contact or how long it would take. If there is a contact, why would you make it active to be seen by others? Is it worth to go ahead and schedule a showing. We already saw the house from outside and looks really nice (and nobody lives there, if that matters. the owners are out of state ).
My first guess is that the contract is contingent on the buyers selling their own house first. Many of these have clauses that if the seller gets another offer, the current buyer has X number of days to drop the contingency or the contract is canceled. So if buyer #2 comes along with an attractive offer, the seller can essentially tell buyer #1 to buy now or they're moving on to offer #2.
On the plus side, a non-contingent contract from a new buyer at the same or lower price could be more attractive to the seller than having to wait 6 months for their current under-contract buyer to sell their own house. Depends on how likely they think it is the buyer's house will sell and how much money they're burning each month on the empty house, among other things.
Can't hurt to look - I wouldn't consider it a waste of time. If you like the house, see what your agent can find out about the seller's situation and work from there.
In times past MOST "active with contract" listings would CLOSE in a reasonable time frame, right now the percentage of sales getting kicked (generally for problems with finance /appraisal) is still pretty low, but noticeably higher. SO if you do see this house and decide you MIGHT like it, the smarter move is to KEEPING looking as odds are NOT GOOD that you will be able to make a bid as "back up" offer, and you'd really be crazy to get in a bidding war in this market (and depending on MLS rules in your area you probably can't make a new offer on a house that has a contract pending...)
A little research shows that the seller slashed the asking by 8.9% just last week (and hence house came into my price bracket). Perhaps that's what it get it going.
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