An interested person wanted to buy, but the transaction did not reach the intended completion. Perhaps financing was lacking, perhaps expectations changed. Before you continue working with a new contact, it is worthwhile to tidy up the current state of work. The following editorial recommendations apply to Austria and Germany. Whether and which obligations from the first transaction remain binding will be subject to a separate professional review.
Do not simply forward the last folder
During a concrete purchase attempt, documents may have been created that apply only to those participants: personal data, personalised drafts, special requests, appointments and open questions. First determine which documents relate to the property and which belong to the failed transaction. The new contact does not need an unchecked personal history of the previous one.
A neutral, up-to-date property file is not created by removing the buyer’s name from the filename. Also check the contents and attached enclosures. This article describes an organisational clean-up and is not a technical guide to secure redaction.
Explicitly obtain confirmation of the legal status
Collect the statements actually made and the course of the first transaction for the responsible advisory service. Ask what follows from them for further preparation and which steps are still required. “The interested party no longer responds” is an observation, not a legal conclusion confirmed by this article.
Record the result with reference to the examined transaction. A general sentence about reservations or the notary appointment in another country does not help here. For this reason the article also does not provide a standard message with which unknown agreements are to be annulled.
Update changes to the property and the offer
In the hypothetical case the first interested party had demanded an additional clearance. An earlier inventory list was therefore altered. After the termination the owner wishes to keep some items after all. Before making a new offer she explicitly reassembles the scope of the sale that is actually desired.
In addition, a technical report was submitted in the meantime. This belongs to the current state of the property even though it was only obtained during the failed attempt. The seller therefore neither accepts everything en bloc nor discards everything en bloc. She examines each change in relation to its subject.
Distinguish open work from completed tasks
An arranged appointment may have been cancelled; the underlying question may remain. Do not therefore mark all tasks from the old transaction as completed. Check which proofs are now available and which actual prerequisites are still missing.
Then create a short starter note for the new process: current scope of the offer, usable documents, professionally confirmed status of the first transaction, still open property questions and responsible contact person. This note contains the necessary factual information, not an assessment of the previous interested party.
Draw a limited lesson from the attempt
Write down what you can prepare differently next time. Perhaps a document needs to be available earlier or a scheduling dependency must be communicated more clearly. A single cancellation proves neither an incorrect market price nor a fundamental unsaleability.
The clean-up is complete when a new interested party can work with a current, factually organised property status and the first transaction has been legally appropriately classified. Then the next attempt begins on a comprehensible basis, without unconsciously carrying forward the previous party’s personal details, special requests and outstanding obligations.