In our case, the attorneys on behalf of the parties, who drafted the draft agreement, explicitly expressed in the draft that it is the signing of the agreement that is supposed to express the parties' discretion and establish their obligations by virtue of it. Thus, various provisions in the draft linked the creation of explicit undertakings at the time of signing. Thus, for example, in clause 2.5 of the draft it was determined that the prohibition of creating a lien would apply "from the date of the signing of this agreement"; clause 5(a) stipulated that "at the time of signing this agreement" the purchasers would pay ILS 203,000 ; clause 8(b) stipulated that "the buyers will sign an irrevocable power of attorney at the time of this agreement..."; In clause 14, it was noted that the parties had read the contract and understood its contents "prior to signing".
Even in the draft agreement that was exchanged between the parties, a designated place was reserved for the signatures of the parties. It should not be surprising that this was done casually. On the contrary, the entirety of the provisions of the draft show that the parties, through their counsel, saw the signing of the agreement as a material stage in the completion of the engagement, and intended that only after their signature would their obligations by virtue of it be formulated. In these circumstances, the absence of a signature on the agreement strengthens the conclusion that at the time the defendant announced that he was not interested in selling the apartment, a decision had not yet been reached between the parties to enter into a binding contract.
This conclusion fits in with the fact that it is a common practice in real estate sales contracts, where the parties to the negotiations prior to the conclusion of a contract agree that only a signed contract will bind them. People from the community, who are not jurists, attach great importance to the status of the signing of the contract, on the assumption that their mutual obligations will take effect only after they have signed the contract. Relevant in our case are the words of the scholars D. Friedman and N. Cohen in their book, Contracts, Volume 1 (1991), regarding the significance of signing the agreement: "... A signature is still an expression of the first degree of the existence of a decision to enter into a contract. A document without a signature creates a presumption that it is not binding. This presumption stems from life experience and the methods of trade. In order to contradict the presumption, significant evidence is needed" (p. 452).