Four steps, no surprises, and you can stop at any point.

We start with what comparable renovated houses in your neighborhood have actually sold for in the last six months. From that we subtract what it will cost us to get your house to that condition, the cost of holding it while the work is done, and our margin. We will show you those figures on the call. Any buyer who will not show you their math is hiding something.

No, and nobody buying for cash will. We buy houses that need work, at a price that leaves room to do the work. What we offer instead is certainty, speed, no repairs, no commission, no closing costs, and no financing contingency. If your house is in good condition and you have three months, list it with an agent. We will tell you that on the call rather than waste your time.

No. No commission, no buyer's fee, no service charge, and we pay the standard seller closing costs including the attorney fee, title work, recording fees, and transfer tax. The number on the offer is the number you walk away with, subject only to your loan payoff and any liens on the property.

Typically 7 to 21 days from an accepted offer. The floor is set by title work and the closing attorney's calendar, not by our funding. If you need longer, we will wait. If you have a foreclosure sale date, tell us on the first call and we will tell you honestly whether we can beat it.

No. Not the roof, not the HVAC, not the carpet. You do not have to clean it out either. Take what you want and leave everything else where it is.

Not because of the house. We walk the property before we make the offer, and once you sign, the price does not move based on its condition. No repair renegotiation, no inspection deduction. Being re-traded a week before closing is the most common complaint people have about cash buyers and it is the one thing we will not do to you. What can still end a contract is never our opinion of the house: every owner and heir on title has to sign, title has to be clear enough to insure, a tenant we agreed to inherit has to actually be there on the terms described, and anything you knew about and did not tell us changes what we were pricing. If one of those ends it, the contract is void and you owe us nothing.

No. The offer is free, there is no obligation, and there is no pressure. If you want to take it to an agent for a second opinion, do that. A number in writing is useful even if you never sell to us.

Single-family houses, townhomes, duplexes and small multifamily, manufactured homes on owned land, and vacant lots, in Gaston, Cleveland, and Lincoln counties. Any condition, occupied or vacant, tenant-occupied or not.

A North Carolina closing attorney. North Carolina requires attorney-supervised real estate closings, which is good for you: an independent attorney searches title, confirms the liens, and disburses the funds. You are welcome to use your own.

Then a cash sale may not work, and we will tell you that directly instead of stringing you along. In some cases a short sale with your lender's approval is possible. We will point you toward it rather than pretend we can help when we cannot.

In our experience gutting these houses, the conditions that destroy value fastest are the ones that make a house unfinanceable rather than merely ugly. Pet urine that has soaked into subfloor and framing, because FHA appraisal standards require a property to be free of hazards, odors and physical defects. Stripped copper plumbing, which means the house has no working water supply. Foundation movement. An active roof leak. A failed septic. Each of those shrinks the buyer pool from everybody to cash-only, and that is a far bigger hit than any cosmetic problem. Dated kitchens, wood paneling and bad carpet cost you money but they do not stop a sale. Locally there is one more nobody warns you about: most of Gaston and Cleveland County is not deed-restricted, so what the neighboring property looks like moves your number more than your square footage does, and no comp report will tell you that.

In North Carolina the slowest stretch is December through February, and the strongest is spring into early summer, published state figures put June as the best month for price and May as the fastest for days on market. Winter buyers tend to be fewer but more motivated, usually because of a job relocation or a lease ending. There is one genuinely local exception worth knowing: in McAdenville, roughly 600,000 people visit between December 1 and 26 for Christmas Town USA. Showings there are effectively impractical for most of that month, so a McAdenville listing either goes before Thanksgiving or waits until January.

Price and condition, in that order, and everything else is a distant third. A house priced against what comparable homes actually closed at, not list prices and not an automated estimate, will move. Beyond that, the highest-return things are unglamorous: make it financeable. Fix an active roof leak, get the HVAC working, deal with peeling paint on a pre-1978 house, and address anything an appraiser would flag, because those are what turn a financed buyer into a cash-only buyer and cut your pool by most of it. Clearing the house out helps more than staging it. A pre-listing inspection lets you deal with problems on your own schedule rather than renegotiating after somebody else's inspector finds them.

There is no single best one and anybody who claims to be it is selling you something. The right buyer depends on your house: an iBuyer's published rules exclude manufactured homes and homes with structural issues, so those houses need a local buyer, while a newer financeable house in a subdivision with plenty of comparable sales may get its best number from an iBuyer or, more often, from simply listing it. What matters more than picking a company is getting two or three written offers, asking each buyer for their after-repair value and their repair estimate item by item, and comparing net proceeds rather than headline prices. We name every cash buyer working this market, ourselves included, on the blog.

Usually not. Under IRC Section 121 you can exclude up to $250,000 of gain on your main home, or $500,000 filing jointly, if you owned it and lived in it for at least two of the five years before the sale. That is a limit on your gain, not on the sale price, so most sellers here clear it easily and owe nothing. North Carolina follows the federal exclusion, and taxes anything above it as ordinary income at the state's flat 3.99% for 2026. Three cases differ: inherited property, where the basis resets to the date-of-death value and the tax is usually near zero; rentals, where depreciation recapture applies and there is often a real bill; and foreclosure or short sale, where the protection for forgiven mortgage debt expired on 1 January 2026. We are not accountants and this is not tax advice. The full explanation is on the blog.

Sometimes, and we will say so. Rent it if it covers the mortgage, taxes, landlord insurance, vacancy, maintenance and a reserve for big-ticket repairs with something left over, and if you actually want the job. Sell it if the numbers only work when nothing goes wrong, if you are moving far enough away that you cannot handle a problem the same day, or if you need the equity. One deadline worth knowing either way: once you have been out of the house more than three years you fail the two-of-five-year test and lose the Section 121 exclusion, which can be worth up to $250,000 of gain or $500,000 filing jointly. Renting while you decide is fine; leaving it open-ended is the expensive version.