Amending an Accepted Purchase Offer in Quebec: The Amendment and Its New Deadlines

An accepted promise isn't set in stone. The inspection turns up a problem, the lender asks for more time, the signing date no longer works: the parties then agree on an amendment. Most people think it simply corrects one point of the promise. In fact, it creates a new agreement, with its own acceptance, and that is what decides its effect on deadlines. This article starts from the amendment; how an acceptance forms the contract is covered in our article on when a purchase offer's acceptance is received.

An amendment isn't a correction, it is a new agreement

One party alone cannot change an accepted promise. To change anything, a price, a condition, a date, both must agree. The amendment is the document that carries that new agreement: one party proposes a change, the other accepts it, and the amendment is added to the promise.

Because it is an agreement, the amendment is formed like the promise itself: it has a proposal, an acceptance, and therefore an acceptance date of its own. That date, separate from the promise's, is the key to everything that follows.

A new acceptance, a new starting point, for what it changes

When an amendment introduces or changes a deadline, that deadline runs the way the amendment provides. If it grants, say, a certain number of extra days to obtain financing, from its acceptance, then the amendment's acceptance, not the promise's, becomes the reference for that condition.

That is what people mean when they say an amendment creates a new acceptance, and so a new deadline. The phrase is accurate on one condition: it only applies to what the amendment touches. For everything else, nothing restarts.

What it doesn't touch keeps its old calendar

This is the most common trap. A buyer signs an amendment extending their financing condition and concludes the whole calendar has been pushed back. But their inspection condition, which the amendment doesn't mention, keeps running under the original promise. If it expires while they wait for the lender, the amendment won't have protected them.

The reading rule is therefore simple: each condition and each deadline follows the calendar of the last document that governs it. Those the amendment changes follow the amendment. Those it doesn't name still follow the promise. Never assume an amendment shifted everything.

The trap of an amendment signed after the deadline

An amendment is normally negotiated before a deadline falls. When it comes after, the situation changes in nature. A condition's deadline has already passed, and the consequences the promise sets for that may already have taken effect.

Both parties can still agree on a new deadline, but it is then a new commitment, which the other party is free to refuse, and not the extension of a right one could demand. The party who needed time is asking rather than negotiating. The useful reflex is to spot deadlines in advance and propose the amendment while there is still time.

Write dates, not numbers of days

An amendment granting "ten more days" raises the question: from when? The end of the original deadline, the signing of the amendment, its acceptance? Each reading gives a different date, and the difference can be enough to start a disagreement.

The fix is to write, for each condition changed, the date and, if needed, the time at which it expires. A date isn't calculated, it is read. It is the surest way to keep an amendment meant to buy time from creating a dispute about time.

Reread the full calendar after every amendment

Your broker prepares the amendment and sends it for acceptance. But the resulting calendar is yours to check. After each amendment, go back over the full list of the transaction's deadlines: those that changed, with their new date, and those that didn't move, with their original date.

That list fits on half a page. It keeps you from discovering, too late, that a condition you thought had been extended expired quietly, or that a signing date was never changed while everything else was.