Reading a ratified contract
A ratified contract is a stack of dates, dollar amounts, and obligations. Here is the field-by-field read that turns it into a clean transaction file.
When a contract ratifies, you are not reading prose, you are extracting a schedule. Every obligation in a purchase agreement attaches to a date or a dollar amount, and your job is to lift each one out and turn it into something the whole party can track.
Start with the effective date
Almost every other deadline counts from the effective date, the day the last party signed and the contract became binding. Get this wrong and every downstream date is wrong too. On a TREC contract, the effective date is filled in by the last broker to receive the fully executed agreement; if it is blank, that is your first phone call.
The nine dates that matter
From the effective date, pull these and put each on the board with an owner:
- Earnest money delivery
- Option fee delivery and the option period end
- Inspection completion (often inside the option)
- Financing / loan approval deadline
- Appraisal contingency, if separate
- Title commitment and survey delivery
- Objection deadline for title and survey
- HOA documents / resale certificate, if applicable
- Closing and possession
Read the dollars next
Earnest money, option fee, sales price, financed amount, seller concessions, and any personal property included or excluded. These are the numbers a title company will reconcile on the settlement statement, and a mismatch between the contract and the closing statement is something you want to catch on day one, not at the table.
A ratified contract you have not turned into deadlines is just paper. The file does not start until the dates are on the board.
Flag the contingencies you do not control
Financing, appraisal, and the sale of the buyer's current home are contingencies that can collapse the deal through no fault of yours. Mark them clearly so that if one is at risk, everyone, agent, lender, and client, sees it coming with time to react.
Done well, the read takes fifteen minutes and produces a file anyone could pick up cold. Done poorly, it produces a 4:55 p.m. scramble on the last day of the option period.