REA insists it's OK to sign a Contract of Sale before having it reviewed by a conveyancer due to cooling off period?

I think it’s not uncommon for it to happen this way, however most often the contracts are written subject to finance, inspections etc. so there’s some extra layer of protection over and above the cooling off.

Few things to consider based on what my conveyancer told me when I was going through all this:

  • IIRC cooling off is not free. You can’t sign a contract, decide ‘nah’ and then pull out scott-free. It costs you a percentage of the deposit. Something like 1.5%. So - if you’re buying a $600k house, it would cost you $1800 to cool off. Which is not a huge deal, but if you are considering it might be something you want to do, it’s a complete and total waste of money.

  • Generally the inspections that the contract is often subject to are pretty inconsequential: the inspector won’t do a whole lot, only looking out for glaringly obvious things (unless you pay a lot more), and the standard clauses mean that only a very small subsection of things are allowable to pull out of the contract (only a select number of things qualify as the appropriate level of structural damage to enable you to pull out). Which means you need to get your inspections done prior to the cooling off period because there can easily be issues that could cost significantly more than the cost to cool off, but are not major structural issues that allow you to get out of the contract.

For these reasons alone, I would be wary of signing without the conveyancer having a look. I’ve also never heard of all interested parties signing a contract. I’ve only ever seen contracts signed after an accepted offer.

I don’t know how busy they currently are, but you should be able to get a conveyancer working for you pretty rapidly. I imagine you could probably get a conveyancer on board and at least advise you on whether it’s a good idea to sign and review the contract on Wednesday.

/r/AusFinance Thread