Earnest money refund and contingency on selling current house

[Keith Lawlor]

Hello!

I was hoping I could get some feedback on the situation I am in now. We are in Texas. My wife an I made a contract on another house with a contingency on selling our current house. We used the standard form "Addendum for sale of other property by buyer". Our current house was under contract, but fell through when the buyers backed out. At this point it doesn't seem to make sense to trying an get funded before the specified closing date in a few weeks, so we are looking to not move forward with the purchase.

We are being told we can terminate our offer at any time we want, and get our earnest money back due to "not receiving proceeds from sale" or "not qualifying for funding"

The way we are reading it is that we need to let the contract automatically terminate on the date specified in the contingency form, and potentially keep trying to sell our house, to get the earnest money back and not be in breach of contract.

We want to be sure not to lose our earnest, and do everything according to the contract.

Thank you so much!

[Wayne Brooks]

We don’t know the exact language of your contract addendum, timelines within it, or notice requirements.  It would be odd/silly for this contingency to run all the way up until the closing date, but I don’t know how you guys do things there.

At the least, I’d communicate with the sellers letting them know the sale of your house has fallen through and it seems highly unlikely you’d procure another buyer and close by your contract date....doing a mutual release now would be beneficial to the seller so they can get their house back on the market.