Alphabet Soup of Contingencies – Is the Property Available or NOT?
May 19th, 2009 Categories: Arlington Dirt, First Time Buyers Club
I know a lot of prospective buyers and even prospective sellers comb the Internet regularly to keep tabs on the market – favorite homes, comparable homes to theirs, homes they’d like to see with their agent, homes they’d like to see at an open, etc… Sometimes the status changes and one of the questions I get pretty frequently is “what does ‘CNTG/NO KO’ mean??
So I thought it might be helpful to spell out some of these terms and what happens during the process of contract acceptance to close date.
When a contract is accepted, either there are contingencies or not – if there are NO contingencies (finance, appraisal, home or radon inspection, etc…) then it gets entered into the computer as “CONTRACT.” These days that doesn’t happen very often but keep the definition in mind because it means that it is on it’s way to settlement with the only way out being default.
Normally there are purchaser’s contingencies like an appraisal contingency or a home inspection – in which case the status becomes “CNTG/NO KO” and what this means is that it is contingent but the purchasers may not be “kicked out” or displaced – the only way to cancel the contract lies with the purchaser for the reasons outlined in their particular contract, but NOT the seller.
On rare occasions, a seller will accept a purchaser’s contract contingent upon the sale of their existing home – in this scenario, a purchaser MAY BE KICKED OUT, or DISPLACED from their first position with proper notice, etc… this is depicted by CNTG/KO – when you see this, you should treat the property as available with acceptable terms/negotiation.
The only other thing we sometimes see is “PENDING” – our MLS system (MRIS) doesn’t use this term but sometimes another website might pick up a variety of “contract” status’ and call it “pending” meaning, generally, unavailable.
Hope that clears up some questions – if you have others, like how to buy in this market, how to get your $8,000 tax credit, how to take advantage of great interest rates or how to best get your home sold, feel free to call me today! (or tomorrow – I’ll be around!)
Happy Tuesday
Jennifer
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Our real estate terms and abbreviations do cause a stir. Our MLS would put bumpable in the case you described meaning that a second offer may be able to bump the first offer because the contingency. To bad we don’t all use the same terms as this probably adds to the confusion