A contract is comprised of several things: (1) an offer, (2) consideration exchange, and (3) mutual acceptance, with some secondary considerations about whether a person has the capacity and legal ability to enter the contract. At the core, though, a contract is little more than two people agreeing to bind themselves to terms that both parties benefit from, on terms that both agree upon. The offeror, the person making the offer, has total control over the offer they make because nobody has agreed to bind anything at that stage. With some limitations at law, the offer can be a creation of the offeror’s imagination. If they want to make the sale contingent on Norway winning the World Cup because the purchase money is coming from some risky polymarket bets, the offeror can do that.
The offeror can also modify or revoke their offer at any time by communicating that change or revocation to the other party to the offer. Changes and revocations in the offeror’s mind, or changes only communicated to the offeror’s agent, will not have any effect. Think of the offer as essentially being “the last set of terms or provisions that you told the receiving party.” If you send a change to your offer by physical mail and the other person accepts the original offer the day before the mail arrives, your change was not effective, and you’re under contract on the original terms of the offer. If you send a change to your offer by physical mail, it gets delivered to the other person’s mailbox, and the other person accepts the offer without looking in their mailbox, you have grounds to argue that no contract was formed because the other party did not accept the same contract you were offering, so there is a lack of mutual acceptance of the same provisions and terms.
There is a consistent question about revocation. Many agents are confident that an offer may only be revoked in writing. While it is best practice for the agent to get revocations in writing to create the cleanest record trail for the transaction, at law, nothing strictly requires writing to revoke. The moment the offeror makes it known to the other party that they are revoking the offer, whether oral or in writing, the other party can no longer accept the contract because it is known to them that the offeror does not intend to be bound to the terms of the offer. The statement “I want to withdraw my offer” spoken to the other party legally shutters the ability to accept the contract.
Some offers may say “I cannot withdraw this offer,” but that provision is largely ineffective and unenforceable because there is no contract formed yet that makes it enforceable. In other words, if I make an offer to you and say “this offer cannot be withdrawn,” but then later withdraw the offer before it is accepted, you can’t sue for injury because we never agreed to anything. This is somewhat separate from the concept of an “option contract,” where we form a fully agreed-upon and consideration-filled agreement that the subsequent offer will not be withdrawable. The distinction between the first situation of an expressly unwithdrawable offer and the second situation of a contractually unwithdrawable offer is oftentimes something that will be lost on the consumer, but can have a significant impact on a transaction.