It’s the bane of real estate sellers and agents everywhere: after struggling for months to find a buyer, an acceptable offer is finally made – with a hitch. The buyer can’t close until he sells first sells his current home.

In a hot market, that was often not much of a problem. But as the Massachusetts real estate market has gotten refrigerated, such contingencies are becoming more frequent. In an economy that makes it hard for an agent to sell one house, now they increasingly have to sell two.

And it’s a problem not just for agents, but also for the region’s multiple listing services. Throughout southern New England, MLS providers are changing their procedures to accommodate the complex contingency sales. How, after all, do you categorize a sale that isn’t a sale, a listing that’s both under agreement and still able to be shown to other buyers?

Last year, the Multiple Listing Service-Property Information Network was forced to add a new designation called “Active with kickout.” The designation is for properties subject to what is known in much of the country as a “Hubbard’s Clause.” Typically, sellers accept a buyer’s offer, contingent on the buyer selling their own property within a designated period of time. Meanwhile, the seller can still shop the house to other prospective buyers, and if one comes in with an offer equal to or better than the contingency offer, the Hubbard’s Clause buyer has a right to fulfill the original deal, but must do so immediately.

About 5 percent of all transactions going through MLS-PIN now have some sort of warning flag, and nearly a third of those are warnings about Hubbard’s Clause contingencies. The number of actual Hubbard’s Clause contracts could be much higher, because agents are not required to note them on the MLS system.

Expanding Options

“Originally we had two categories – Active and Under Agreement,” said John Breault, director of customer support at MLS-Massachusetts. A third status, Active with a Flag, was added in 2005.

And in 2007, Active with Kickout – so-named because it allows a seller to effectively “kickout” a buyer whose deal contains a Hubbard’s Clause – was added at the request of brothers Stephen and Joseph Fisichelli, broker-owners at RE/MAX Preferred in Methuen.

“The idea is that it allows the property to stay in active status, and gives the seller the benefit of still marketing the property to get backup offers,” Joe Fisichelli explained.

Active with Kickout favors sellers, he said, explaining that it gives them more options to sell their property because other Realtors know it’s still available despite the specific – and harder-to-meet – contingency.

The simple “Active with a Flag” status indicates a property where “the deal seems to be more solid,” Breault added.

“It may be that [Active with Kickout status] is more used” today than in the past, he said.

Fisichelli estimated about five percent of all properties on Massachusetts MLS today are flagged in some way, and about 25 to 30 percent of those are flagged as “Kickout.”