5 Contract Mistakes Utah Buyers and Sellers Make

By Dave Robison

Dave Robison is one of Utah’s most accomplished and trusted real estate professionals, having sold over 3,400 homes in just over 26 years.

Most real estate disasters do not announce themselves. They hide in a single checkbox, one overlooked line, or a word that carries a very different meaning inside a purchase contract than it does across the kitchen table. In twenty-six years of selling Utah real estate, I’ve watched the same five mistakes surface again and again.

They look small on paper, right up until they cost someone their earnest money, a moving weekend, or the ability to sell their own home. The encouraging part is that each one is easy to catch before anyone signs.

1. Possession is not the same as closing. This is what trips up buyers most. In Utah’s standard purchase contract, the day everyone calls closing is actually settlement, the moment you sign and bring in your funds. Closing is something else entirely: it is when the loan funds and the county records the sale, and in most cases that happens the next business day.

Because possession is tied to recording, a buyer who signs on Friday and schedules the entire move for the weekend can discover the home won’t record until Monday. The calendar, not the celebration, decides when the keys are yours.

2. A cancellation only counts in writing. Even attorneys stumble here. I once had a lawyer under contract on one of my listings who wanted to renegotiate, so he texted that he was canceling. The message wasn’t signed, and it didn’t come from all of the buyers on the contract. The agreement is clear that a cancellation has to be in writing and signed, which means that text canceled nothing at all. Once everyone understood that, the sale went forward and they bought the property.

3. The HOA fee box quietly favors the buyer. It seems minor, and yet I see it constantly. The contract includes a box designating who pays the HOA’s change-of-ownership fees, and most buyers mark that the seller will pay. What sellers rarely realize is that the language captures those fees regardless of what the association calls them, which can sweep in the buyer’s own setup costs. When an offer arrives written that way, I typically counter, so my seller covers the transfer fee and the buyer takes responsibility for their own setup fees.

4. Earnest money belongs in a brokerage trust account. The contract is explicit: earnest money is to be deposited into a brokerage’s real estate trust account. Even so, I still watch agents place it with a title company instead, and the distinction turns urgent the instant a deal falls apart.

As a broker, I can read the contract and release the funds according to its terms. A title company, by contrast, can require both buyer and seller to sign off, and if either refuses, the money simply sits. I’ve seen earnest funds languish in a title company’s account for years, because no one is willing to go to court to free them.

5. Beware the contract that never ends. The costliest mistake of all is signing an agreement with no finish line. Buyer’s agents routinely send offers that hinge on their client selling an existing home, and they’ll phrase it in a way that sounds perfectly reasonable, something to the effect that closing will occur thirty days after the buyer’s home goes under contract.

For the seller, that sentence contains no end date. In theory, the buyer could take ten years to sell, and you would remain bound to them the entire time. Whenever I encounter an offer like this, I counter it, spelling out exactly how my seller can step away and when they can return the home to the market.

None of these traps requires a law degree to avoid. Each simply requires that someone read the contract with a trained eye before the signing begins. That is the Utah Dave Way: catch the small things on paper so they never become expensive things in real life. If you’re thinking about selling, this is precisely the kind of review that protects both your timeline and your proceeds.

When you’re ready, I’d be glad to go through your contract line by line with you before your name goes on anything. Call or text me at 801-966-4000, email me at dave@utahdave.com, or visit blog.utahdave.com.