Powderhound: Legally, yes, you have an enforceable contract once the offer is made and accepted. But if the seller in the mean time takes a higher offer and hoses the first offeror, practically, what are you going to do? Courts won't force the seller to go get the car back from the buyer and sell it to you. That's called "specific performance" and courts only do it in the case of unique property, like real estate or art. For a car, you'd have to prove the measure of your damages. Maybe you could go out and buy another one and haggle over the price difference as a measure of damages, but that's hard to do, since the prices would differ for all kinds of reasons. Damages are supposed to get everyone where they would have been if the contract had been performed. You could argue that you should get the difference between what you offered and what the actual buyer paid. Say you offered $10,000 and the seller took a later offer of $12k, you argue that if you had bought it for $10k, you would have had a $12k car, making $2k in profit in the deal, so that is what you should get from the seller, who should have sold you the $12k car for $10k, losing $2k in the deal you got. Then you can supposedly go out in the market with your extra $2k and buy another one for $12k. But you'll spend so long doing this just to end up with $2k, it isn't worth it. Spend your time searching for the next deal instead of litigating the last one. And if you are going through a dealer, their Offer to Buy form they make you use probably calls the deposit "liquidated damages" which means that's all you get in case of breach.