A Counteroffer Extinguishes the Initial Offer Which Cannot Be Unilaterally Revived by Subsequent Acceptance
The First Department determined that no binding contract for the sale of real property had been reached after a series of offers and counteroffers. In the course of the decision, the court noted some of the relevant black letter law:
The record demonstrates that the parties never came to terms and instead proposed a series of offers and counteroffers to which they never mutually agreed. …To enter into a contract, a party must clearly and unequivocally accept the offeror’s terms … . If instead the offeree responds by conditioning acceptance on new or modified terms, that response constitutes both a rejection and a counteroffer which extinguishes the initial offer … . The counteroffer extinguishes the original offer, and thereafter the offeree cannot … unilaterally revive the offer by accepting it … .
…[O]ral acceptance of a written offer can form a binding contract for the sale of real property * * *. Thor Props LLC v Willspring Holdings LLC, 2014 NY Slip Op 04237, 1st Dept 6-12-14