Hey Berks County! Selling your home on the market with an agent requires clean out, and certain things (like the roof, septic system, etc) to be in good working order. See our video below to find out your options for selling and if listing your home on the market with an agent is a good route for you! Or if selling Cash, As-IS may be a better option.
Hey Berks County, April Crossley here with Berks County House Buyers, answering some more of your common questions. A lot of times we’ll have sellers contact us and we like to give multiple options for selling. So we’ll tell people, “This is what we can offer you cash. If you have a home that’s in need of repair and it’s full of stuff and you need to sell it quickly in Berks County or if you just need a more flexible timeline to sell, this is what our cash offer would be.” If you’re going to list it on the market, we would refer you to an agent or chat with one of our agents about your property and have that agent give you kind of a ballpark of what they feel the property could be listed at on the market.
A lot of times people will wonder, if a home in Berks County is in need of repair, can they list that home on the market? Will the person being able to buy it be able to get a mortgage if the home needs fixing up? So I’m just going to go through some common things today that often inhibit someone from getting a mortgage on a home to purchase it on the market, and these are a lot of things we see when people call us to buy their house cash. So sometimes it has to do with handrails. This is a pretty easy fix, but we have a lot of older homes in Berks County and you’ll see a lot of homes that don’t have any hand rails in place. So no hand rails to the basement, no hand rails going up the steps to the second floor, no hand rails outside on the steps, no railing around the porch. Well, when a traditional home buyer who’s getting a mortgage comes along to buy your house, when it’s on the market in Berks County, they will often have a home inspector come out.
Even if they don’t have a home inspector come out an appraiser is going to come out so that the appraiser can say, “Yes, the house looks good and can a mortgage company give a mortgage on this property,” and hand rails is one of the things that they’re going to look for. So that might be an easy fix for you, to throw some handrails up. So some other things that they look for are to make sure there’s heat in every room. And I get this a lot. We look at a lot of older homes and sellers will say to me, “It had no heat upstairs when I lived here, when I was a little kid, and we were totally fine because heat rises and the bedroom stayed warm.” And that’s great, but unfortunately now, if someone wants to get a mortgage on a house, you have to have heat in those rooms. You have to have heat in the bedrooms upstairs, you have to have heat in the bathroom, you have to have heat on every room. You have to have electrical outlets. Per code, two outlets on opposite walls in every room.
So a lot of times we’ll go in and the electrical system will be old, so you’ll see one outlet in a room or some rooms just don’t have any electrical outlets. So those are some other things and appraiser will look for or a home inspector will look for. They’ll also look to make sure the roof is good. This is really common. So a lot of times people will call us and say, “I need to sell my house cash in Berks County. I can’t sell it on the market because my roof is in terrible condition and the mortgage company will not give any buyers a mortgage on the home because the roof is in terrible condition, and I don’t have the money to fix up the roof and put on a new roof before I sell it.” That is really common. So that’s when a cash buyer becomes a better fit than listing it on the market because a roof is a really expensive job to fix.
Another thing is the heating system. We have sellers in Berks County from time to time that call us for a cash offer on their home and the reason they’re not listing it on the market is because they don’t have a functioning heating system in place. So they might’ve had a heater that broke down or some of them just never had a heating system in place. I’m not sure why. We have a lot of older homes, so sometimes they’re running off a coal stove or a wood burning stove but they don’t have any other kind of heating system in place. So if you don’t have a functional heating system in place, someone’s not going to be able to get a mortgage on that property and a fair cash offer on your home might be a better route for you.
Some other things, kitchens and bathrooms. You have to have a functional kitchen and a functional bathroom and you’re probably thinking, why wouldn’t you have a functional kitchen? So just some examples. We’ve gotten calls from people that were mid renovation and there was a drastic change in their life and they either had to move out of state or they were in the middle of working on a rental property and the kitchen was torn apart and there was no kitchen in place. So a traditional home buyer that’s getting a mortgage won’t be able to get a mortgage on that property without a kitchen. Bathrooms, a lot of times, I’ve seen older homes in Berks County that actually don’t have full bathrooms. They’ll have a toilet and a sink, but they won’t have any kind of shower or bathtub. Or they might have a tub but they don’t have a toilet, but they have an outhouse so they don’t have a full bath that’s functional in the house.
So in those situations, they also, a traditional home buyer, would not be able to get a mortgage so they’re sometimes calling us to purchase the home cash instead. Then we take on the job of fixing up the kitchen, fixing the roof, putting in a full bathroom. These are some pretty major projects that a lot of people don’t want to come out of pocket with the money to do. And the last major one, which we talk about in other videos on our websites, so you can check it out at berksdirectcashbuyers.com or on our YouTube channel, Berks County House Buyers, and that is a septic system. You have to have a working septic system in place. If you don’t, a traditional buyer will not be able to get a mortgage on the property. This is really common. We often buy houses that have failed septic systems.
Again, just like a roof, it’s a major expense and a lot of sellers don’t want to come out of pocket for money to fix up a septic system prior to moving somewhere else. Or they’ve had a property for a long time and they’ve never had the septic inspected and they put on the market and upon inspection, the septic system fails and the traditional buyer is like, “I don’t want anything to do with it.” Whereas a cash buyer, we’re used to problems like that. We’re used to fixing really old roofs, adding kitchens, adding bathrooms, doing major work to properties so that you don’t have to. So if you’re in any of these situations, feel free to give us a call. We do free consultations to make sure that we’re a good fit for you. We’ll let you know if we feel like a cash offer is a good option, or if you are able to list your home on the market as is, you can reach us at (610) 816-6205.