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Maybe offer slightly above asking? And have your real estate agent assure them that you're 100% interested. That's probably the only thing that would have swayed me toward on offer with a contingency. We got so many low ball offers with people who weren't crazy in love with our house so a few of them didn't pursue when we gave them a reasonable counter offer.

Have you tried a letter? Sometimes if people know your story and know why you love their home so much it may touch their emotional side and swing them your way. That being said, we recently had the same situation and they rejected our offer outright. Turned out to be a blessing in our situation though. Hope something works out for you!

You could try increasing your earnest money. If the deal goes through it gets applied to your downpayment.

When we bought our home we were competing against another buyer that gave the seller more earnest money. The seller liked our mortgage holder better (big name) and countered us with that. It made them feel better.

Does the contingency have to be explicit? We put an offer in on our house once we had an offer on ours. It was still very up in the air until the week before closing thanks to the buyer's mortgage company. At our closing, our real estate lawyer said that we could always take the contingency off the table if need be. It wasn't set in stone or certified documentation.

I agree with a letter and photos. When we bought our home, there were multiple offers on it. It was the 4th offer we were putting in and I was sick of looking at houses (and being disappointed when the offer wasn't accepted). While looking at the house I saw a picture of the owners dog which happened to be the same breed as ours. I wrote a letter and sent a picture of our dog. No joke, that's what got our offer accepted. The woman said she cried when she read our letter and thought it was so sweet that we connected with them through our dog.

I would write a letter. They can say they want a quick sale and dump the house or whatever, but given this time of year, unless you live in Scottsdale or something, its not exactly a hot time to sell. I would make your best offer, write the letter, and then let it be. Contingencies are totally normal and they can always come back to you once they realize they can't dump their above-appraisal priced house in the winter.

We just sold our house last week after 6 months on the market and 3 contracts that had fallen through. None of the 4 contracts had contingencies and we wouldn't have taken an offer with contingency just because we knew that during the month the buyer was working on selling their house we would have no problem getting cleaner offers. Also, we were well above tax value but had no problems getting multiple offers above asking so we must not have been over priced. (A new tax value came out in December well above what we were asking).

All that being said (just to explain where they may be coming from), earnest money and due diligence money definitely drew us to some offers over others.