Nearly 53,000 signed home-purchase agreements fell apart in a single month this spring, according to Redfin’s tracking of March 2026 closings, 13.4% of everything that went under contract, tied with 2023 for the highest March cancellation rate on record outside the pandemic. Most of those collapses were buyers getting cold feet over rates and closing costs. A smaller, angrier slice runs the other direction: a seller signs, shakes hands, sets a closing date, and then changes course. Sometimes it’s a relative who suddenly wants the house. Other times it’s a stranger who shows up with a bigger check days before the deal is set to close. Either way, the buyer is left holding a locked-in mortgage rate, a paid-for inspection, and a closing date that no longer means anything.
How Often This Actually Happens
Redfin doesn’t break its national numbers down by which side pulls out, but the scale of the churn is real. The brokerage’s September 2025 report found 15% of purchase agreements nationwide were canceled that month, more than 53,000 deals, up from 13.6% a year earlier. Tampa, San Antonio and Atlanta topped 19%; San Francisco, Nassau County and San Jose stayed under 7%. More than 70% of cancellations happened during the inspection window, when buyers most often walk. Seller-side reversals are the smaller category, but they’re the ones that tend to end up in an attorney’s inbox, because the buyer in that scenario did everything right and still lost the house.
What the Law Actually Says
Once both sides sign a purchase agreement and the contingency periods pass, a seller doesn’t get to unwind the deal just because someone else waves more cash. California real estate attorney Zachary D. Schorr’s firm addresses this exact pattern in its own published client guidance: “A seller cannot cancel merely because a better opportunity arises,” the firm writes on its site. It walks through the scenario directly: “A seller signs a contract, then attempts to cancel after receiving a better offer. If the original buyer complied with the agreement, a court may order the seller to complete the sale.” The remedy is called specific performance, and real estate is one of the few areas of contract law where courts grant it routinely, because every property is treated as one-of-a-kind. A cash settlement can’t replace the specific house a buyer contracted for. Schorr Law also flags a second tool, a lis pendens filing, which clouds the title in public records so the seller can’t quietly close with the higher bidder while a lawsuit is pending.
New York attorney Yuriy Moshes, founding member of Moshes Law, P.C., lays out a similar path for buyers on the other coast in his firm’s own guidance, published on its site. If a seller backs out without a legitimate contractual basis, Moshes Law writes, a buyer “may sue for specific performance or monetary damages.” And if the seller does have a valid, written-in exit clause, the firm notes the buyer is still owed their earnest money back in full. That deposit was never the seller’s to keep just because they’d rather sell to someone else.
Why “I Got a Better Offer” Isn’t a Loophole
Standard purchase contracts don’t include an escape hatch for seller’s remorse. The built-in exits (financing contingencies, inspection contingencies, attorney review periods in states that use them) belong mostly to buyers, not sellers, by design. A seller who wants flexibility has to negotiate that into the contract up front, in writing, before signing. Once that window closes, courts have generally treated “I found someone willing to pay more” as closer to an admission of breach than a legitimate defense. That holds even when the higher bidder is family. A relative offering more the week of closing doesn’t change what the seller already signed, and it doesn’t give the seller a legal out. It just raises the odds the buyer calls a lawyer instead of a moving company.
What a Buyer Actually Does Next
The practical math still matters. Suing for specific performance means paying an attorney to force a sale that could still fall through in court, and it can take months a buyer under a rate lock doesn’t have. Plenty of buyers instead take the guaranteed earnest money return and go find another house, especially in the market Redfin describes as having roughly 600,000 more sellers than buyers nationally as of this spring, plenty of inventory to choose from even if this particular house is gone. But the ones who do go the legal route aren’t chasing a technicality. A signed contract is supposed to mean the search is over. When a seller treats it as a placeholder they can outbid at the last minute, the paperwork buyers have left is the same paperwork that started this whole process, and it still says what it says.
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