How Long Do You Have to Respond to an Offer in Maryland?

Few moments in a home sale carry as much quiet tension as the first offer. Imagine your home goes on the market Friday morning, and by 3 p.m. an offer is already waiting, with ten more showings still on the calendar. Do you answer right away? Do you owe the buyer a reply by tonight, or by tomorrow?

In many ways, buying and selling a home resembles the early stages of dating. Both sides signal interest, gauge compatibility, and decide how long they can afford to wait before responding. As in dating, timing can make or break the match.

Maryland sets no response deadline. Maryland’s standard contract of sale contains no provision that causes an offer to expire at a set time. In other states around our area, the agreement does carry that kind of term, but here, there’s no standard expectation of a built-in deadline. That absence cuts both ways, however. A missing deadline on paper doesn’t mean a buyer is prepared to wait indefinitely.

Your options when an offer arrives. When an offer comes in, I tell my sellers the decision is entirely theirs. You can respond immediately. Or, depending on how much interest the home is drawing, you can allow ten more showings for a set period and set a deadline by which all offers must be submitted. In that case, your agent notifies every buyer who has toured the home, or plans to, that a deadline is in place.

Deadlines change how buyers behave. In practice, buyers respond to a deadline in very different ways. Some welcome it, submit an offer, and step into a competitive situation without hesitation. Others cancel their showing altogether because they simply don’t want to compete.

That reaction mirrors life more broadly, where plenty of people would rather walk away than take on the stress of a contest. Meanwhile, the buyer whose offer you already hold may decide they aren’t willing to wait either and withdraw before you ever respond.

An offer can disappear anytime. This is the point I most want sellers to understand. Once an offer is submitted, the buyer can withdraw it later that day, the next day, or at any moment while they wait for your response. Consider it from the buyer’s side. In effect, the seller is saying, “Thanks for your offer, but I’d like to see whether something better comes along.” It’s easy to see why some buyers feel slighted, take their ball, and go home.

Defining a knock-your-socks-off offer. When I represent buyers on a home that has just hit the market, I ask them to picture themselves as the seller. What would you need to see to stop waiting and sign? I call that the knock-your-socks-off offer, and what qualifies depends on the situation.

An asking-price offer with a couple of contingencies is a good offer, but a seller who has just listed may reasonably wonder whether something stronger is on the way. By contrast, an offer $10,000 over asking with inspections waived signals a buyer who clearly wants the home, and many sellers would conclude there’s little reason to keep waiting. Borrowing from The Godfather, the goal is an offer they can’t refuse.

The crystal ball is broken. There’s no perfect answer, and no exact science to how this plays out. The real question for a seller is whether you feel good enough about the offer in hand to accept it without worrying about what might have been. The alternative is to see what could be, at the risk of losing what you already have. What comes next may be better, or it may be nothing at all. Choose the path you can sleep at night with, including the possibility that the buyer walks away.

Flexibility serves both sides. Whether you’re buying or selling, flexibility and understanding go a long way. Until an agreement is in writing and everyone is on the same page, an offer can vanish, a better one can appear, or nothing may come along at all.

My job is to make sure sellers understand every possible outcome, and from there, the ball is in their court. For buyers, the question is what you’re willing to pay for the home. For sellers, it’s what you're willing to take without worrying about what anyone else might pay. That’s the dance.

Once both sides do reach agreement, experience matters just as much at the closing table. That’s why I refer my clients to Friends Title & Escrow, an attorney-owned and operated title company with local offices in Maryland and West Virginia, licensed in Maryland, West Virginia, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Florida. They combine today’s technology with an old-school personal touch.

If an offer lands on your Central Maryland, Southern Pennsylvania, or West Virginia Panhandle home and you’re weighing whether to respond now or wait, I’d be glad to walk through it with you. Call me at 240-549-6659, email jay@dayhometeam.com, or visit blog.dayhometeam.com.