Need To Sell Your House In Cutler Bay? We Buy Houses For Cash.

The deal we did not do

The seller told us everything in the house was new. Most sellers who say that believe it — it is very rarely anybody being dishonest. It is just that work done years ago feels recent, and nobody goes looking for problems in a house they live in.

We paid about four hundred dollars for a full home inspection out of our own pocket, which is what we normally do. Two reasons. We want to know exactly what we are taking on rather than guessing at it. And the insurer is going to want that report anyway, so it is better dealt with at the start than discovered as a problem later.

It came back with a great deal wrong.

That changes the arithmetic, and it changes it in one direction only. Every item on that list comes out of what we can pay, because we are the ones who will be doing them.

The seller wanted $550,000. With the repair list in front of us we could get to $470,000, and not a dollar further. That gap was not a negotiating position and we did not treat it as one — it was simply what the condition of the house cost, subtracted from what the house would be worth once it was fixed.

There is a point where the number a seller needs and the number the condition supports do not meet. This was one of those.

So we did not buy it, and there were no hard feelings on either side.

We gave them the inspection report. We paid for it, and it is theirs for nothing. They now know what is actually wrong with their house, which is worth having whoever ends up buying it, and the next buyer's inspection will not come as a shock to them.

We would far rather be the buyer who tells you the truth and walks away than the one who ties your house up for a month and then renegotiates at the end. If our number does not work for you, say no. You will have lost nothing, and you will be holding a report you did not pay for.

And sometimes the gap has nothing to do with repairs at all. A seller has a number in their head that came from what a neighbour got two years ago, or from what the house was worth before the roof went, or simply from what they need it to be worth in order for the next thing to work. That is a very human thing and we do not hold it against anybody.

If that is where you are, it is completely fine to tell us no. We are not going anywhere. A good number of the houses we have bought were ones where the answer was no the first time we asked, and no the second, and then something changed and the number made sense. There is no expiry on a conversation with us, and nobody here is going to chase you.

The pool alone was going to cost more than she had

She had been in the house a long time, and it had gradually got beyond her — first the contents, and then the building itself.

The pool had stopped working, and putting it right was going to run into tens of thousands on its own. Between that and the state of the house, it was no longer somewhere it was safe or sanitary for her to be living as she got older.

What she wanted was not the highest possible price. It was cash, and somewhere smaller that she could actually look after.

We bought it as it was. Everything in it, and the pool. She did not clear a room, fix anything, or arrange a single skip.

People stall on houses like this for years, and it is almost never about price. It is that every route to selling appears to begin with emptying decades out of a house before a single buyer will walk through it. You can skip that step entirely, and most people do not know that.