Broker to broker
The listing that will not finance
Every agent working Gaston County, Cleveland County, Lincoln County, Catawba County has had one. The seller needs out, the house will not pass an appraisal, and the only buyers who can close are the ones who make you wish you had never taken the listing.
I am Alec Clausen, a North Carolina real estate broker, licensed since 2020, and I buy those houses for my own account. Not a lead broker, not a wholesaler assigning your contract to a stranger. If your listing is one of these, I will give you a number in writing within 24 hours, or I will tell you it should stay on the market and why.
Why would an agent call a cash buyer? Because a house that cannot pass an FHA or VA appraisal has a buyer pool of investors and cash, and pricing it for that pool on the MLS takes months of showings that go nowhere. Selling it directly gets your seller a date and gets you out of a listing that was never going to close at list.
What actually kills a financed sale
This is the useful part, and it is worth knowing even if you never call me. An FHA appraiser is instructed to assess whether a property is safe, sound and sanitary. Any one of these will stop a financed deal, and most of them are invisible in photos:
- Pet urine through the subfloor. Not a smell problem, a structural one once it reaches framing. It is the one condition that most reliably fails an appraisal and the one sellers most reliably underestimate.
- An active roof leak, or a roof with under two years left.
- Peeling paint on anything built before 1978. Lead-based paint rules make this a condition, not a cosmetic note.
- No functioning heat source. A dead furnace in November ends the deal, not the negotiation.
- Septic failure, or a well that will not pass a water test. Common out toward Casar, Vale and the western end of both counties.
- Knob-and-tube or an unpermitted panel. The Loray Mill village housing stock and the older Lincolnton streets are full of both.
- Foundation movement, standing water in a crawlspace, missing handrails, broken windows. Individually small, collectively a dead file.
- Unpermitted work. Forty years of somebody's own additions is the single most common surprise in this market.
If you are looking at two or more of those, the financed buyer is not coming, however long you leave it up.
What I buy, and what I do not
Yes: single family and small multifamily in Gaston County, Cleveland County, Lincoln County, Catawba County. Any condition. Occupied, vacant, tenant-occupied, hoarder, fire, estate, pre-foreclosure. I do the cleanout, so your seller leaves what they want to leave.
No: anything outside those four counties, and anything where the seller would plainly net more by listing it. If your listing is sound and just needs a price adjustment, you already know that, and I am not going to pretend otherwise to win a deal.
And the part most buyers will not put in writing: I do not re-trade. The number I send you after walking the property is the number at closing. If I find something afterwards, that is my problem, because I am the one who walked it.
How it works from your side
Send me the address
Call (704) 481-6298 or use the form below. Tell me what the problem is; I have probably seen it.
I walk it, with you or without you
In person, every time. No inspector, no contractor parade through your listing.
Written number within 24 hours
With the math behind it, so you can show your seller how it was reached rather than asking them to trust a figure.
Close at a North Carolina attorney
Usually 7 to 21 days, on your seller's date.
Compensation is a conversation, not a policy page. Bring it up on the call and we will put whatever we agree in writing before anything moves.
Why I am telling you what I pay
There is a page on this site that shows a house I bought, what I put into it, what it resold for and what I actually made, including the one where a water heater ate most of the margin. Agents are the last people I would hide that from: you can price a renovation as well as I can, and you will work out the spread in about four minutes anyway.
The detail behind all of that
How Much Do Cash Home Buyers Actually Pay in North Carolina?
The real formula behind every cash offer, why the discount is bigger on some houses than others, and how to check whether the number you were given is fair.
What Cat Urine Actually Does to a House (And Why It Stops a Sale)
Why pet urine is different from a mess, what it does to subfloor and framing, why FHA and VA appraisals flag it, and what fixing it takes.
The North Carolina Foreclosure Timeline: How Much Time You Actually Have
How power of sale foreclosure works in NC, what each notice means, when the sale becomes final, and the 10-day upset bid period most people don't know exists.