How to Write a Contingent Offer That Wins in New Braunfels
Will a New Braunfels seller accept a contingent offer in 2026?
Yes, and far more often than most buyers expect. Inventory is up and homes are sitting longer than they did at the peak, so a seller who turns down every contingent offer is turning down most of the buyer pool. What matters now is how the offer is built. Get your current home genuinely ready to sell, keep the timelines short and specific, accept a kick-out clause, and your contingent offer competes on close to even footing.
By Drake and Michelle Carter | October 1, 2026
In 2022, the word contingent was the end of the conversation. Sellers had ten offers by Sunday afternoon and zero reason to wait on anybody to sell a house in another county. We watched good buyers get skipped over for months.
That market is gone. Homes here take real time to sell now, and a seller staring at week seven on the market thinks about a solid contingent offer very differently than a seller fielding ten offers in a weekend. The buyers who understand that are getting houses they would have lost three years ago.
Here's how to build one that actually gets accepted.
Not every contingency is the one sellers fear
This trips up almost everyone. Buyers hear "contingent" and picture a single scary clause, but nearly every offer written in Texas carries contingencies already, and sellers barely blink at them.
Financing. Unless you're paying cash, your offer depends on a lender approving the loan. Standard, expected, priced into every deal.
Appraisal. The lender's valuation has to support the number. Also standard, and a bigger deal in a shifting market than it was two years ago.
The option period. Your unrestricted right to walk during inspections, paid for up front. Every Texas buyer gets one, and no seller treats it as a red flag.
Then there's the one that actually changes a seller's answer: the home sale contingency. That's the clause saying you can't close until your current house sells. In Texas it rides along as its own addendum to the contract, and it's the one a seller reads carefully.
Understand why. The seller isn't judging you. They're doing math on risk. Their house comes off the market, other buyers move on, and their closing now depends on a transaction happening somewhere else that they can't see, can't control, and can't fix. Everything that follows is about shrinking that unknown.
Make your house the easy part
The most important work on a contingent offer happens before anybody writes anything.
A seller is not weighing your offer against the others. They're weighing the odds your house actually sells, on time, at the price you're counting on. Your job is to walk in with that question already answered.
What makes a seller believe you:
Your home is already listed and live. Not "we'll list next month." Active, photographed, on the market. A contingent offer backed by a house that doesn't exist yet on MLS is the weakest version of this there is.
It's priced to sell, not priced to test. This is where most of these fall apart. If your house is priced $40,000 over the comps, the seller can see it as clearly as we can, and your contingency becomes a bet nobody wants to take.
You already have activity. Showings, feedback, a pending offer, or better yet an executed contract with the option period behind you. Each step forward makes you materially stronger.
Your agent can speak to it. We call the listing agent on the other side with the days on market, the showing count, and the pricing strategy. That conversation does more than anything written into the offer.
If you haven't started on your side yet, start there. We walked through the full sequence in our guide to how to buy before you sell in New Braunfels, and the prep order matters in our Hill Country home sale prep timeline.
Need to sell your current home before you buy the next one? Drake and Michelle build the timeline and the offer strategy together with you, before you start touring, so you're not negotiating from behind. Schedule a free meeting with The Carter Team and we'll map out both sides of your move.
The terms that buy a hesitant seller's confidence
Once your house is credible, the structure of the offer closes the gap. These are the levers that move sellers here.
Accept a kick-out clause. This is the big one, and new buyers resist it for the wrong reasons. A kick-out lets the seller keep marketing the home while you're under contract. If they get another offer, they notify you, and you have a set window to either drop the contingency and move forward or step aside and get your earnest money back. Buyers hear "they can still sell it out from under me" and flinch. Flip it around: the kick-out is the thing that lets a nervous seller say yes at all. It hands them a safety net, and it costs you very little if your house is priced correctly and moving.
Keep every window short and specific. Vague is fatal here. "Contingent on the sale of buyer's property" with no dates attached reads like an open-ended option on someone else's house. Name the deadline by which your home goes under contract, name the close date, and keep the response window on a kick-out tight. Short, defined timelines signal that you've thought this through.
Strengthen everything you control. You can't make your other house sell faster, so compensate everywhere else: larger earnest money, a shorter option period, clean financing with a real underwriting approval rather than a two-line pre-qualification, and few or no repair requests on small items. Every one of those says the rest of this deal will be smooth.
Solve the seller's timing problem too. They have to go somewhere. A lease-back lets them stay in the house after closing for a defined stretch while they finish their own move, and in Texas these short-term arrangements are handled on their own form, typically for 90 days or less. Offering flexibility on the calendar is sometimes worth more to a seller than money, and it costs you nothing but patience.
One honest note: we're REALTORS, not attorneys, and the contract forms get revised. Your agent should walk you through the exact current addenda line by line before you sign, because the specific deadlines and notice periods are the whole ballgame on a contingent deal.
What gets a contingent offer rejected on sight
The failures are consistent, and every one of them is avoidable.
Your house isn't on the market yet. There's no contingency to evaluate, just an intention.
Your house is overpriced. The seller's agent runs the comps too. An unrealistic list price turns your offer into a waiting game with no end date.
Open-ended timelines. No deadline for going under contract, no firm close date. Instant decline.
Refusing the kick-out. You're asking a seller to carry all of the risk and give up their backup options. Almost nobody takes that deal.
A weak offer everywhere else. Low earnest money, long option period, a soft pre-qualification letter, and a contingency on top. Any one of those is survivable. Stacked together they're a no.
Leading with the contingency instead of the plan. Presentation matters. An offer that arrives with days on market, pricing rationale, and a clear timeline reads completely differently than the same terms dropped in cold.
And know your alternatives before you commit to this path. A contingent offer isn't the only way to buy before you sell. We compared the financing routes in bridge loan vs two mortgages in New Braunfels, and the broader offer strategy lives in our guide to writing a winning offer in New Braunfels and the Hill Country. Sometimes a bridge loan is the better answer. Sometimes selling first and negotiating a lease-back on your own house is cleaner. The right call depends on your equity, your timeline, and how much uncertainty you can live with.
The headline is simple: contingent offers work again in this market, but only when they're built to remove the seller's doubt instead of asking them to absorb it. Price your home honestly, get it live, keep every deadline tight, take the kick-out, and strengthen every other term you control.
That's a sequence, and the order matters. We run both sides of these moves for New Braunfels and Hill Country families constantly, which means we know what the listing agents on the other side of the table are actually looking for before they say yes. Schedule a free meeting with The Carter Team and we'll build your timeline and your offer strategy together, before you start touring.
About Drake and Michelle Carter Drake and Michelle Carter are licensed Texas real estate agents and the founders of The Carter Team at Keller Williams Heritage in New Braunfels. They specialize in helping buyers and sellers navigate the South and Central Texas Hill Country, serving New Braunfels, San Marcos, Canyon Lake, Seguin, Spring Branch, Bulverde, and North San Antonio. Follow along on their YouTube channel for honest, no fluff advice on living and buying in the Hill Country.
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