Hey, all. I hope you don’t mind, I’m going to drink my coffee while I chat to you about this one. We have a lot of people that are looking to sell their home. We’re coming up on the winter months and they don’t want to hold their house over the winter months because utilities are expensive in the winter months and they just need to sell. And a lot of people want to escape and go be a snowbird in Florida. So people will ask us, “What are my options when I’m looking to sell my house? How do I sell my house? What are the first steps to selling my house? And do I want to use a real estate agent? Or do I want to sell my house cash quickly, be done with it, move on, and not have to do anything?”
So luckily for you, you have a couple options. And then we encourage you to explore all of your options when you’re looking to sell your home, so that you are 150% comfortable with the option that you choose. So let’s start with the most obvious option for selling your house, and that is consulting with a real estate agent. And I know what you’re thinking, “I’m going to have to pay them a commission.” That’s the first thing everybody says. I am not a real estate agent, but if you would see what real estate agents do behind the scenes, the stuff you never hear about, to keep deals together and get them the closing, you wouldn’t mind paying a commission to a real estate agent.
So yes, you have to pay a commission. But you still will get more money on the market with a real estate agent than you will selling to a cash home buyer. We buy houses cash in Berks County, Pennsylvania and in several other counties throughout the United States. But we always tell people what they could get if they wanted to list the home on the market with an agent and how much time it would take them to get that amount. Listing on the market with an agent is a little bit slower. Little bit slower, okay? They do charge a commission, but you typically will get more money for your house listing with a real estate agent. Your other option is to sell your home to a cash home buyer.
And I would say quickly, but we also buy cash and buy houses slowly. We’re buying a house cash this week in Berks County, and the seller’s staying there for two months after we buy it. So we’re not making them move out quickly, but we’re getting them cash in hand, so that they have money to move. So why would you sell to a cash house buyer instead of using a real estate agent? Speed is definitely key. If you want to sell your home quickly, you don’t want to be messing around by putting your home on the market. It can take a while. That’s because traditional buyers get mortgages. And it can take 6, 8, 10 weeks to close when someone’s getting a mortgage. When someone gets a mortgage, you also have inspections and appraisals.
When someone buys cash, there’s no inspections and no appraisals. So the appraiser can’t come in and say, “We really don’t want to give a mortgage on this house because the roof looks a little iffy. So now, I’m going to make you get a roofing specialist to come out and inspect this thing to see if we really want to give you a mortgage on this house.” You just have to jump through a lot more hoops when you have inspections and you’re getting an appraisal. When we buy houses cash, there’s no inspections and no appraisal. We’re buying as is, where is. That means we’re taking it in the condition it’s in. That’s it. You don’t have to clean it out. So say you’ve been living at your house for 30 years, and now you want to sell your house cash and you’re downsizing into an apartment and you have all this stuff.
What do you do with all this stuff? You’ve been living in your house a long time. Lucky for you, if you sell cash, you don’t have to worry about it. We will buy the house full of stuff. We’ll take care of cleaning out the stuff when we have a dumpster there and we’re cleaning out other things because we’re going to renovate the house. Okay? So you don’t have to clean it out. You also don’t have to fix anything. So sometimes when you get an appraisal, an inspection, you’re dealing with a mortgage company, they’ll say, “You need a railing here. You need this. You need that.” You don’t need that kind of stuff when you sell to a cash house buyer. In fact, in my area in Berks County, Pennsylvania, a lot of the municipalities have what we call transfer inspections.
So you will have the mortgage company, the appraiser, the home inspections the buyer is ordering, and then you will also have the municipality saying, “You have to fix the sidewalk. You have to put a handrail up.” Sometimes they inspect the interior of the property. Good thing about selling to a cash home buyer is that we come in and we take care of all those municipal inspections. So even if the municipality is requesting that things get repaired, we call the municipality and we ask if we can just take care of repairing those things within two weeks after settlement. And they are fine with that. So the seller doesn’t have to do any repairs at all. Nothing. We take on all repairs. So no inspections on our part, no appraisal, don’t have to do any repairs, don’t have to clean out the home, and you can sell it quickly.
Or you can stay in the home for after settlement and don’t have to sell quickly, or you can say, “I’d like a cash offer, but I want to sell six months from now.” Very flexible. A cash offer is very flexible. When you’re selling on the market, not so flexible. You better have that house cleaned out. You better have everything fixed up. The buyer’s going to send you through a ton of inspections. And it’d better be broom swept and ready to go when you have the keys for them at settlement. That’s a lot of coordination, a lot of timing, a little stressful when you’re looking to sell your house. But you have other options other than selling cash. So we definitely recommend that you get an opinion from a realtor, get an opinion from a cash house buyer such as Berks County House Buyers, and choose the option that works best for you. For your free no obligation consultation, we can connect you with an agent and give you a cash offer on your home. Give us a call, (610) 816-6205, or check out our website, berks610.com. We look forward to helping you.