Hi all,

First of all, I do plan to check this with my conveyancer but I am also looking for other people opinions/experiences as I have seen information from lawyers and conveyencers also varies between them.

My wife and I have found a place in Rolleston we really like, we had been looking for a while and even had an offer on another place we like get declined as it was subject to sale of our house, so we have decided to get our house on the market and sell before making more offers on other places we like.

Our plan was to get our house sold unconditionally then start looking for a new place again and make offers without the subject to sale clause, which should make our offers more appealing to sellers. The deadline on our house sale is tomorrow and we already have an offer we are happy with, and possibly two more offers coming according to our agent. The potential buyer will obviously want 10 or 15 days to satisfy their finance and lim etc.

The house we like had a deadline 1 week after our deadline, so our house sale would not be unconditional by then and obviously there is a chance the buyer of our house may not be able to go unconditional if they dont get finance or something like that. This leaves us two choices for the house we like, we put our offer in with a subject to sale clause and explain that our house is conditionally sold anyway and hope that would be appealing enough to the sellers, or, as the selling agent has suggested, put an offer in without the subject to sale clause but use the subject to finance clause to fall back on if our buyer is unable to go unconditional as our pre-approval require an unconditional sale of our house.

I would never trust 100% what a selling agent tells me, but this is something I never thought of and there does seem to be some sense in it? I am just curious if there is any pitfalls/risks in relying on a subject to finance clause rather than a subject to sale clause in our situation? as mentioned already my pre-approval is based on an unconditional sale of my existing place anyway.