What We Buy
One to four family houses, attached and detached. Small multi-family buildings. Condominium units and co-operative shares. Cleared lots where a structure has already come down. Smoke damage through to total loss, with an order posted or without one, claim open or settled or denied or never filed at all.
Where we say no, it is usually geography rather than condition. Outside the five boroughs and the immediately adjacent Westchester and Nassau markets, we are the wrong buyer and will say so rather than take the enquiry and waste a fortnight of yours.
How We Arrive at a Number
The same way every honest buyer does, which is worth stating because the process is not mysterious and treating it as though it were is how sellers get taken advantage of.
We estimate what a finished, occupiable property at that address is worth. We subtract what it costs to get there, which in New York means the engineer, the filings, the permits, the trade work and the reinspections needed to lift an order, or the specialist demolition needed to clear the site. We subtract the carrying cost across a timeline set by agency queues rather than by us. We subtract the city and state transfer taxes. What is left, less a margin, is the offer.
Why Do Different Buyers Quote Such Different Numbers?
The Conflicts You Should Know About
We are the buyer. That is a conflict, not a partnership, and reading anything on this site without holding that in mind would be a mistake.
What follows from it in practice: we benefit if you accept a lower number, we benefit if you sell rather than restore, and we benefit if you decide quickly. We have written these pages to be useful anyway, and the way to test that is to check the facts against the offices we name rather than taking our word for them.
We are also not several things people assume. We are not brokers and take no commission — we do not represent you at all. We are not public adjusters and take no part of your claim. We are not engineers or expediters and will not file anything on your behalf. We do not assign contracts to other buyers. And we are not lawyers, which matters in a state where transactions run through attorneys and where estate, tenancy and coverage questions all need someone qualified.
Where Somebody Else Is the Better Buyer
This is the section most buyers leave out, and it is the most useful one on the page.
A neighbouring owner, on an attached building. If your row house is joined to theirs, they avoid the party wall problem that makes your property difficult for everyone else. They can rationally pay more than we can.
A developer, where the zoning permits more than what burned. They are pricing what may be built rather than what stood there. On a site with unused development potential they will beat a buyer pricing a replacement house.
Nobody — you should keep it. Where a masonry shell survived, the order is close to lifted and repair sits well below finished value, restoring and listing nets more than any cash offer including ours. Our written figure will say so when that is what the arithmetic shows.
Why Would You Tell Me Not to Sell to You?
Reaching Us
Send an address through any form on this site. Before you deal with us, run the checks on our page about how to tell local cash buyers apart. They apply to us exactly as they apply to anyone else, and we would rather you ran them first than wondered later.