5 Conclusion

Many jurisdictions have had their fair share of debate regarding the question as to when and how to protect the performance interest of the grantee, mainly in the context of immovable property. In many cases, the answer current private law provides is unsatisfactory, and to some extent remedied by legal practitioners. Private law does provide tools to secure the performance interest in an elegant way, such as the priority notice. The answer as to whether and to what extent these tools can be applied, however, seems to be based on property law tradition and doctrinal discussion, rather than a debate focused on policy arguments such as maximizing the value of assets and lowering transaction costs. This article argues that these tools – ‘vacuum instruments’ – have the potential to accommodate these policy goals in a considerably more desirable way than is currently the case in many modern jurisdictions, and illustrates this point by comparing currently existing vacuum instruments in vastly different jurisdictions on the basis of a newly-developed theoretical framework.