Yes, I know they’re scummy as fuck. Yes I know they’re gonna turn it into yet another overpriced rental. But I’m mostly asking if they’re otherwise legit.
I get those offers all the time and typically shitcan them immediately. The most recent offer I got is for twice what I paid for the place, and honestly, it’s enough to be my ticket out of this backwards-ass shithole state. Otherwise, barring a surprise lottery windfall, I’m stuck here for the foreseeable future.
Assuming all is above board, the main concern I have is if it’s worth that much to them, wouldn’t it be worth that much to me? FWIW, I like my house and my neighborhood, but it sadly exists within a shithole of a redneck state where I’ve been disenfranchised all my life, and I want the fuck out of here.
Edit: Thanks everyone. I knew they were scammy/scummy but several of the replies cleared up how they operate, and it’s scammier than even I was thinking. Back to buying my weekly lottery ticket and hoping for the best. 🤞
I’ve made over a million dollars by selling other people’s homes since they don’t ask questions like “is this your house?” or “how come you’re not in any of the photos on the wall?”
I looked in to one once. They offered me $80k. I sold the house with a legit realtor a few months later for $370k. I consider them to be complete scams.
I’m assuming your state based on the dubvee lol, but I wouldn’t trust a damn thing about them. You’d lose more money to them than you’d pay to a realtor after a successful sale. The market is weird rn, so idk if it’s still solidly a sellers market, but you’d still likely come out way ahead going through a realtor. It honestly is not a bad process, it just sucks because if your house won’t pass inspection or appraisal, it’s a headache to get stuff fixed.
I’m assuming your state based on the dubvee lol
lol, yeah.
I went through inspection and appraisal 5 years ago when I refinanced, so that’s all fine. But I would lose my insanely good mortgage (15 year at 2.2% APR) and have to start again with whatever current rates are though I could likely put down a very large down payment.
I wasn’t seriously considering the offer so much as wondering how legit it was in preparation to sit down and think about thinking about considering the offer lol. But the replies here have cleared up how predatory these offers are, so, yeah, it’s going in the trash with the rest of the similar offers.
Lol the shit hole state part was all the damning evidence I needed.
Yeah, it just isn’t worth it. Selling is, all things considered, pretty painless, especially if you have no work needed. Just sit and listen to offers, and try to determine which ones are real people vs private equity if you want. Although when I sold mine, we had people literally break our counter during a viewing? Lmao so that kinda sucked but it was a minor inconvenience.
Although when I sold mine, we had people literally break our counter during a viewing
Lmao it was surreal. The next viewing was there early in the driveway waiting to go in, and they heard a like crashing noise, then the people inside quickly left, and made it a point to say “yeah the counter was already broken” and just dipped lmao. The 2nd groups realtor told ours, because obviously why wouldn’t they lol
Assuming all is above board, the main concern I have is if it’s worth that much to them, wouldn’t it be worth that much to me?
Yes, and then some. It sounds like you’d do better randomly selecting a realtor to throw it up on MLS “as-is,” and even better if you followed the usual, admittedly annoying, process. These companies are not literal “risking jail” scams, but they’re not your friends either, and they will not be offering you anywhere close to market value. My sister and I looked into a couple of them when our dad passed, and the offers were far below what we pulled with a Realtor, even priced to move and with a kind of costly “turnkey” arrangement where they arranged cleanup and inspections.
My mother did, a few years ago. She won’t tell me the offer she got (aside from it being “a lot” higher than what she’d initially paid, but I don’t know that price either), but she regrets it, now that she’s seen what her house was later re-sold for.
Not sure how accurate it is, but usually you can just search the address on sites like zillow and see the sales dates/price of sale
Its accurate. Home sales are public information. All the retalor sites pull from the same data.
Generally you can look up the land records via a state, county or city website.
For example, Bridgeport CT https://www.bridgeportct.gov/government/departments/town-clerk/land-records
Always look for the .gov websites.
Stuff like “county records.org” are data broker /resellers who are just serving up public records that you can get yourself from the source.
Judicial records are often similarly available
OP, I tried out one of those guaranteed offers. it’s a giant scam: they told me amount X, but they’d send an inspector to adjust in minor details. The inspector came, they made me wait another week, and then offered “guaranteed” 60% of X. The whole thing wasted two weeks of my time that I could have spent finding a buyer.
Note: when you sign a contract as a seller with a realtor, you are generally on the hook for the commission even if you don’t sell through the realtor. You could force a clause into the contract that makes that exception, but the realtor is realistically going to wait with marketing until that’s sorted out. You’d still lose time, basically.
Now, if you are not currently talking with a realtor, you might as well invite as many of the cash offers into your place to give you a binding offer. I’d make sure they are still reputable firms that aren’t just there to scope your place or to sell your information, but if you are not actively thinking of contacting a realtor, you might as well talk to these people and see if they are for real. Do not sign anything, of course, until the final number is there.
So there could be a few angles, all angles are you likely getting less for the convenience.
One angle is that the contract they offer gives them the right to back out and to sell the contract to someone else, typically refered to as wholesaling. Their goal is to offer you say $150k and attempt to sell it for $200k to someone else. And if that fails, they cancel the deal and walk away.
Another angle is they are a flipper and think they can make a profit regardless of the shape. They’ll still do an inspection to make sure there isn’t anything major.
If they reached out to you, their margin will be tighter because they want to be in the area. If you reached out to them, their margin will be larger because you might be desperate for cash.
If you talk to them, they will pressure you into signing a contract, but it would be worth it to find a real estate attorney to review the contract and be on your side.
I haven’t, but if you’re looking for the name, they’re called “wholesalers”. Typically they get houses that won’t sell on the market normally because they require too many fixes and aren’t safe to live in. They’re then sold to flippers.
Note, you don’t actually sell to wholesalers, you sign a contract with them to sell to the holder of the contract for the agreed upon price. Then the wholesaler sells the contract to the flipper for a flat fee.
2nd note, a lot of people think they’ll get cash once the contract is signed, that’s not the case as the wholesaler has to sell the contract. This can be adventageous if the owner is facing foreclosure. Typically you can get more money from a wholesaler/flipper, than if your house goes into foreclosure. Because the wholesaler usually has a list of flippers on the books and a sale is often just a call away.
That makes sense, and is most likely what the offer is. House isn’t a slum, and I’m not facing foreclosure, so I guess they think they can make a profit on it.
I wasn’t seriously considering it, but I was at least looking into it because, yeah, I want out of here.
Yea, most likely. Typically your options for getting out in order from best to worst are:
selling yourself
selling normally with a realtor
selling “as-is”/short sale normally with a realtor
burning the house down
these wholesale guys
foreclosure
though if the house is in decent shape the foreclosure can be better given the current state of the market.
If they offered twice what you paid for and you want to sell and get out, put your house in the market for three or four times what you paid for and see what happens.
What happens is you’ll get a cashier’s check that bounces. A lot of these “We Buy Your House” scams are effectively just check-bouncing scams, where they try to get the title to your home in their names without offering real payment.
Once the house is in their name, the law is on their side. You securing payment from them is far more difficult than them evicting you.
Why would you transfer the deeds to the property before the cheque clears?
Once the house is in their name, the law is on their side.
If you negotiate a contract and the other party fails to fulfill their obligations, the law is not going to be on their side even if they got paperwork signed.
Obviously a court is not going to support an eviction if that eviction is part of a fraud. That’s ridiculous.
Obviously a court is not going to support an eviction if that eviction is part of a fraud.
You would be surprised. The folks running these scams know the law (and the bureaucrats who actually manage it) way better than you. And they know the buttons to press that fast-track their complaints against you way better than you know the defenses you can employ.
This isn’t a question of the strict legal verbiage or the spirit of the law. This is a question of experience navigating bureaucracies, and the general bias they show in favor of landlords over tenants. They’ll be able to move faster because they’ve done this (or worked with people who have done this) repeatedly. Unless you’ve got an (often expensive) legal counsel, you’ll be stuck trying to explain yourself to a sheriff or a judge long after your title has been traded to a third party who doesn’t care if you were ever rightfully compensated for your sale or not.
Legal evictions aren’t a rapid process. There would be plenty of time to provide the court with documents proving fraud.
Can you provide a single example of someone buying a house with a check that bounces and successfully evicting the rightful owners despite not paying for the house?
Where I live that transaction would be void by statute. No court would process an eviction or lien if they the buyer did a felony to get the deed signed over.
I havent seen that but I have seen several examples out of Texas (youtube news segments) where someone straight up forges sale documents, demolishes the house, and then the property rapidly changes hands between shell companies before landing in the portfolio of a developer.
And if you could afford private legal counsel you wouldn’t be considering selling to this kind of scummy service in the first place.
They know exactly who their “customers” are.
The person you’re replying to is saying to avoid the scammy buyer offering 2x, and instead list normally at 3-4x.
That won’t do anything to avoid scammers.
Yes it will.
When you sell your house “normally” through a real estate company it is the real-estate company who acts as an intermediary in the transaction. They collect money from the buyer, then pay you, and the transaction completes.
The real estate agent takes a cut for their services, but there is less potential for fraud than if the buyer sends you money direct. The real estate company has a vested interest in making sure the sale goes through properly, because they won’t get their cut otherwise.
It’s the title company that does that, not the real estate agent.
Thanks for the correction.
Regardless, an impartial third party does it, and that’s the key part in making you less likely to be scammed.
What’s wrong with the traditional route? A Realtor will list any house. Just empty it out, sweep it clean, and put it on the MLS. If you ask below market it will sell. If the price is right, it will sell the first day on the market. You don’t need to do anything more than clean it. No painting, no staging. You can probably even sell the house as-is, if repairs are needed.
You’ll come out better than with the scam company, even with paying the commission.
I suggest researching your market. No one is offering more than your house is worth, more likely you just don’t realize how much your house is worth at the moment. But, you should also research wherever you want to move to, of course.
Nothing wrong with a realtor, but I’d have to have somewhere to move to while it’s on the market which could be any length of time. I only skimmed the offer, but it mentioned something about transition period for moving, etc.
I was mostly hoping this would let me short-circuit the usual process of selling and moving, letting me get the money for it, and find somewhere temporary while I look for something permanent.
Other than just wanting out of this awful state, I really don’t want to move/sell. I’d worry about finding another job later as I work remotely now but am expected to go in on occasionally so couldn’t work from another state for too long.
But as the replies have made clear, this entire industry is more of a scam than I assumed it already was, so I’m just gonna keep buying lotto tickets and hoping for the best.
Part of a sales contract can be a rent-back for a period of time. You sell the house to the buyer, they pay for it, you get the money, and you rent it back from them for a few months or whatever. Everybody wins in this situation.
During the sales process, you have to clear the inside and the near-outside of your house of junk: Throw it a way, put it away into storage, fill your garage to the gills with it, rent one of those driveway storage containers
I go through houses on sale that have the owners still living in them all the time…
It’s not easy, it’s not quick, but is it worth to you the multiple $100k’s that you can get for your house?
You are absolutely right, but the time frame for a traditional house sale is still in the month range, at least. The only way around it is a cash buyer that voids all inspections, because just coordinating a mortgage, appraisal, inspection, and mandatory repairs takes some time.
If you are lucky, you’ll find a cash buyer with no contingencies, but it’s rather rare, depending on how (little) desirable the property and the location are.
You were almost vulnerable to their scam OP because you want to escape so badly. That fucking sucks I get it, but these ghost companies will usually scam you in one or multiple ways. Glad you asked questions first.
they are scams.
they prey on ignorant and desperate folks.
just like any scamming thing.
I’m not saying it isn’t a shitty practice, but reading this makes me think we need a word that differentiates between getting robbed through manipulation, and just not getting a good deal.
The “Microsoft Rep” that needs $10,000 in Apple gift cards, is a scam.
The guy who buys your house for half it’s actual value may be manipulating you to get a deal, but in the end everybody gets what they agreed to. It’s still shitty when you realize what happened afterwards, but I think it deserves a differentiation from illegal scams.
They’re both forms of fraud. The gift card one is misrepresenting their position to trick you into giving them money. The house scam is misrepresenting your position to trick them into giving them something worth more than the money they give you. The only difference is that when they misrepresent you, it is expected that you be aware of your own situation such that you will be treated as though you gave informed consent, even if you didn’t. It’s analogous to the difference between someone sexually assaulting you by pretending to be a doctor vs never promising to be a doctor but telling you how sick you look and how they’re no expert but they’d be willing to condescend to feel around inside your undies as a favor to you. The only people who accept the offer have to be so dumb, desperate, intentionally misinformed, or some combination of all three as to be essentially incapable of informed consent.
I would say the line between the two is found in desperation.
If I’m in the middle of nowhere and run out of gas, I wouldn’t be happy paying some guy $50 for a gallon of gas to get me to the next station, but it serves my needs, and of course I’d have spent less had I planned better, but this guy got me out of a tough situation.
If some other guy gives me the same offer, but then runs off with my money and gives me no gas. I’m out the money AND I’m still screwed.
Fuck that guy twice as hard as the first guy.
I’d take it as both being ‘past the line’ regardless of distance. If someone is seeking to defraud people, I don’t care whether their targets are made easier by desperation or not. The guy effectively robbing you is bad, but that doesn’t mean the guy price-gouging you isn’t. He didn’t help you out of a bad situation. He moved you from one bad situation to another. They are both harming you, and both would be prevented from doing it again in any just system.
Yeah, I guess. I’m not saying a paper cut is a good thing, I’m just saying it’s better than a broken femur.
If your stance is that everything bad is equally the worst thing ever, that’s your perspective and I hope it serves you well.
I’m not saying worst thing ever. I’m not catastrophizing. I’m not saying equal. They are different things. I’m saying unacceptable. I’m saying extent, though extant, is irrelevant to the question of acceptability.
This is an important point that keeps coming up in a thousand places and a thousand ways. The fact a femur can be broken does not make the papercut meaningless, acceptable, or excused any more than the fact someone can torture you and your loved ones for days on end could mean it’s acceptable to ‘only’ break your femur. If we try to scale measurement of harm in relation to ‘what might have been,’ attempted murder is completely acceptable as long as it fails, successful single murder is negligible as long as mass killings are possible, mass killings are fine as long as genocides are possible, and so on, and so on… You do not want to live in a world which takes the idea of ‘at least it’s not…’ seriously.
Cool. I don’t. I think manipulative tactics are fucked up and illegal.
Anytime a sales person tries to manipulate me I walk away. Usually they become abusive… probably because manipulating people is a form of abusive coercion.
But hey, I also don’t associate with anyone in marketing or sales… for this very reason. They tend to think manipulation is the entire point of human relationships.
Too bad for both of you, there’s already a term: ripoff.
So you believe walking into a pawn shop and selling something to them for an agreed upon amount is no different than someone just stealing the object from you? They are completely different degrees of skeevy to me.
Also we could just throw most car salespeople into the pawn shop position, because that’s their entire job is to weasel as much money out of a person as possible.
Maybe just any commission job. As the employees are gambling they can swindle people for more money than they would otherwise get with a flat price tag
Yeah, that’s why I walked away from every car dealer who was a weirdo manipulative twat, and I bought my car from the sales person who was honest and didn’t try to sell me upgrades and sold me the car for the quoted price. They exist.
I walked out of 6 different dealerships before I found an honest salesperson. And they got my business.
Just like I don’t buy shit from pawn shops or other shady businesses.
I don’t disagree with any of your points, and I feel the same way about sales tactics, but I still think straight up robbery is much worse and it’s own category.
They are trying to lowball people who need cash. If you accept an offer you have most likely been ripped off by 50k-200k
