What is a subject to sale offer and do sellers accept them?

It is an offer conditional on the buyer selling their own home first. Sellers do accept them, but usually at a lower price or with a time clause attached, because the seller is carrying the risk that the buyer's sale never happens. The weaker your position on price, the more likely one gets accepted.

What is a time clause?

A term added to a subject-to-sale offer letting the seller keep marketing the property. If another offer comes in, the first buyer gets a set window, often 48 or 72 hours, to remove their subject to sale or step aside. It protects the seller and puts the first buyer under real pressure.

What is the difference between the completion date and the possession date?

Completion is when money and title change hands at the land title office. Possession is when the buyer actually gets the keys, normally the next day. There is also an adjustment date, which is what property taxes and utilities are split against. They are three separate dates in a BC contract and they can be negotiated separately.

Can I rent my house back from the buyer after closing?

Sometimes. It is negotiated as part of the offer, not asked for afterward, and the buyer's lender and insurer both have to be comfortable with it. It is more often agreed for a few days or weeks than for months.

What happens if my sale and purchase dates do not match?

You either carry both properties for the gap, or you have nowhere to live for it. Which one you are facing depends on the direction of the mismatch. Both are solvable, but they are much cheaper to solve before the offers are written than afterward.

Making the dates work when you sell and buy

By Dan Jones · September 12, 2026

Bottom line: a BC contract has three separate dates, completion, possession and adjustment, and all of them are negotiable. Most people accept whatever they are offered. Widening the gap between completion and possession by a day or two costs nothing and removes most of the pressure from moving day. If you need to sell to buy, a subject-to-sale offer usually needs to be stronger elsewhere and will often come back with a time clause. If your house sells first, ask for a longer completion or negotiate a rent-back, and do it in the offer rather than afterwards.

I am Dan Jones, a REALTOR with Royal LePage Locations West in Penticton, licence number 1118346, licensed since 2004. Most of my work is downsizing, where the dates are the hard part.

The decision of whether to sell first or buy first is the hard part. This is the other half: once you have decided, how the dates actually get arranged so you are not carrying two houses or living out of a hotel.

Most of this is negotiable. People do not realise that, and they accept the first set of dates they are offered.

Three dates, not one

A BC contract has three, and they are not the same day.

Completion is when the money moves and title transfers at the land title office. Your lawyer or notary handles it.

Possession is when the buyer gets the keys. Standard practice is the day after completion, which gives the money time to clear and gives you a day to finish moving out.

Adjustment is the date property taxes, utilities and strata fees get split against.

All three are negotiable, and they do not have to move together. Widening the gap between completion and possession by a day or two is one of the cheapest things you can ask for, and it takes a lot of pressure off moving day.

Subject to sale

If you need to sell your home to buy the next one, your offer can be made conditional on that sale. It is called a subject to sale.

Sellers do accept them. But understand what you are asking: you want them to take their house off the market on the strength of a sale you have not made yet. So a subject-to-sale offer usually needs to be stronger somewhere else, most often on price, and it will often come back with a time clause.

A time clause lets the seller keep marketing. If a second offer arrives, you get a set window, usually 48 or 72 hours, to either remove your subject to sale or walk away. If your house has not sold by then, you are choosing between buying without a sale and losing the property.

That is not a reason to avoid subject-to-sale offers. It is a reason to have your own home listed, priced properly, and genuinely saleable before you write one. A subject to sale on a house that has sat for four months is not an offer anyone takes seriously.

When your house sells first

This is the more common problem for downsizers, because the family home is usually the more saleable of the two.

The options, roughly in order of how well they usually work:

Negotiate a longer completion. Ask for 90 or 120 days instead of 30 or 60. Some buyers want that anyway. It costs you nothing and it is the single most useful thing you can ask for.

Negotiate a rent-back. You sell, the money moves, and you stay on as a tenant for an agreed period at an agreed rate. It has to be negotiated in the offer, not raised afterward, and the buyer’s lender and insurer both have to be fine with it. It works well for days and weeks, less often for months.

Store and stay somewhere. Expensive, disruptive, and it means moving twice. It is the fallback, not the plan.

When you find the right place first

Then you are looking at carrying both, at least briefly.

Bridge financing covers the gap when your purchase completes before your sale does. Most lenders want a firm sale, subjects removed, on your existing home before they will fund it. That is the detail people miss: bridge financing is not a substitute for selling, it is a substitute for waiting.

Carrying two mortgages without a bridge is possible if you qualify for both. Ask your lender whether you do, and what it costs monthly, before you write the offer. Not after.

Either way that is a conversation with your lender, in writing, first. I can tell you what your house is likely to sell for and how long it should take. I cannot tell you what you qualify to borrow.

How much time to leave

More than you think, and for reasons that have nothing to do with real estate.

The transactions are the fast part. Sorting forty years of belongings is the slow part, and it is not a task that responds well to a deadline. Build the timeline around the sorting, not around the paperwork.

If you are aiming for next spring, start sorting now.

What I do with this

Before either side is in motion, I want to know three things: what your lender says you can carry, how firm your own sale needs to be, and what date you actually want to be in the new place. Those three answers decide the sequence.

Then the dates get built backwards from there and written into the offers, rather than accepted from whatever the other side proposed.

If you are working out the sequence, that decision is covered here. If you want to talk through a specific pair of properties and dates, email me.