Compared with the "buyer", the "seller" faces less risks in the real estate transactions. However, the "seller" still needs to pay attention to some important risks to avoid losing money and getting involved in long-term litigation.

Please note that this article only analyzes the risks from the perspective of the real estate sellers. For risks related to real estate buyers, please refer to the article: "Risks that "the buyer" should be aware of when buying real estate".

The most important risk that the seller must pay attention to is payment risk

Before analyzing this risk, let's take a look at a famous case. In this case, the buyer agrees to buy a real estate of the seller at the price of VND 58 billion. To gain confidence, the buyer deposited to the seller VND 11 billion. Because the seller is too trusting, the seller agrees to notarize the real estate contract and hand over the real estate certificate to the buyer without receiving full payment at the time of notarization of the contract. But after the contract is notarized, the buyer delayed paying the remaining amount of VND 47 billion. Not only that, after a while, the seller discovered that the buyer had sold that real estate to another person for only VND 28 billion.

This is the most important risk that the seller should pay attention to when selling real estate. Although the buyer has not paid in full, the buyer can still carry out the land change registration procedures to change the owner of the Real Estate Certificate to him/her if the notarization of the contract is completed.

Lesson: To prevent this risk, the seller needs to ask the buyer to pay in full at the same time with the notarization of the contract and the seller only hand over the Real Estate Certificate to the buyer after receiving full payment.

Risk of deposit penalty due to contract breach

Let us have a look at another case. In this case, the buyer and the seller have an agreement to transfer a real estate for VND 25 billion. The buyer deposited VND 7 billion in advance for the seller. When making a deposit, the house is in the construction process. Even so, the deposit contract gives the buyer the right to move into the house to live as soon as the deposit is made. After that, because of illegal construction, the house cannot be completed to carry out the real estate transaction. The buyer asked the seller to return the deposit of VND 7 billion and an additional fine of VND 7 billion because of failing to comply with the deposit contract, VND 14 billion in total. The seller does not agree to pay the deposit penalty, so the buyer continues to occupy the disputed real estate.

Lesson: The seller should carefully consider the all possibilities that could lead to an inability to perform the real estate contract before signing the contract in order to avoid a deposit penalty. In which, there are some common cases the seller should be careful of:

• The house was built illegally or in contravention of regulations, so it was not completed.
• Real estate is a common property, but only a few co-owners want to sell, not all.
• Real estate is in dispute, in case of clearance or acquisition.

In addition, to avoid future troubles, the seller only hands over the house to the buyer after the seller has received the full payment or received at least 90% ~ 95% of the contract value.

Risk of buyer exchanging the fake Real Estate Certificate

There have been a number of incidents related to this risk. The trick used by the fraudster was to have someone visit the real estate and ask the landlord to copy the Certificate. Next, he/she created a fake Certificate. After that, he/she continued to let another person visit the real estate again. At the second time, the visitor also asked the landlord to show the Certificate and swapped the fake Certificate when the landlord did not pay attention to. This trick was only discovered after the real estate had been sold 2 times and was being mortgaged at the bank. At that time, the landlord knew he was holding the fake Certificate.

Lesson: The Seller needs to preserve the Real Estate Certificate carefully in all cases.