Is it Better to Sell your House AS-IS or to Fix it up?

Is it Better to Sell your House AS-IS or to Fix it up?

This is a pondering debate for every homeowner when the time comes to sell their first house. For many individuals, the first house is a sentimental milestone bringing the child from the world of play to the infinite universe of being an adult.

As one enters the void of unpredictability, few changes in our lives bring on such a rewarding tingle of the heart and brain as purchasing your first house. Moving into a new place that has a sense of achievement and pride within every single seemingly irrelevant detail.

Over the course of the first few months, this massive trophy purchase is transformed into a home with your personality being reflected in all aspects. From the color scheme of the walls and furniture to the upkeep, of lack thereof, of the lawn. Truly your first house acquisition takes little to no time to transform into the beauty behind the beholder and become YOUR home. ​

As your home is typically not something most Americans can acquire with a lump sum of cash, a mortgage becomes a regular part a month’s budgeted bills. Obviously to pay this substantial payment, along with the many others that come with it like electric, gas, water, sewage, etc., a sustainable career must be worked. Then all your friends and family will want to come over to visit and see the new place.

To be fortunate would be to have a close-knit group surrounding you to conspire a housewarming party in which a shower of gifts might help relieve the financial burden of transitioning into such a commonly overwhelming milestone in your life. The cookie cutter American dream leads one to get married and have kids as the next rung on a ladder to be climbed to reach ‘success’. 

This house transitioned into a home, then the home transformed into a personalized peaceful oasis, followed by the standard American dream that only the movies can make look any better. Friends and family now crawl in and out of every nook and cranny at all hours of the day and night. A new entitled role of your life leaves you with many social responsibilities that hit you like a truck on the highway, but in a warming and loving way. Life is absolutely perfect. 

Truly life could not get any better. Although the obvious thought begins to cross your mind on an increasing frequent basis, this house is getting too small and the family is growing bigger. It is time to upgrade to something with a little more space to live in. Sounds easy enough.

So, you consider selling your first home and looking for something a little larger while staying within your price range. The money in the form of equity will surely help you find a new home with a low enough payment to make it all worthwhile. Your recollection of the process of buying your current house is surprisingly still clear in the distant memories of the past.

One of the big things you remember being a topic of harsh negotiations is the repairs needed on the property in question. Well now the roles are reversed and you have to make sure the repairs are adequate enough to suffice for random new person to be able to qualify for a loan from the bank to purchase your house. 

After a small look around this same home that you and your family have occupied for many years, the noticeable number of needed repairs are transparently clear. The windows were old when you moved in and have not been replaced. The outside of the house has moss growing up the side of the once extravagant stonework.

Floors covered with irreversible stains and threads beginning to fray from the rough edges surrounding commonly used doorways. Inside the kitchen is incredibly old appliances that work fine for you and your family now but surely would not appease a new home buyer.

Dollar sign after dollar sign begin to flash before your eyes. Even if you can afford it, the overwhelming amount of work this is going to take starts to accelerate a growing amount of anxiety. So, you sit down and take a deep breath, slowly pondering your options available.

​Your mind eventually simplifies it into one of two decisions. Make the all the necessary repairs affordable at this present moment in time and argue with a retail home buyer later about it or sell the property AS-IS and save all your money for the next future home. Well, let us look at the options…

Fix it up before you sell

For many, fixing up your property in which you have legal responsibility over is automatically on the to-do list. All houses eventually need some tender, love, and care. Most of the small repairs on the agenda only requiring a few dollars here and there.

Twenty dollars for some new caulking to replace the ancient moldy version surrounding the cracks on your primary bathtub. Ten dollars for a pair of yard sale edition pruners to remove the limbs hanging uncomfortably close to your vehicle in the driveway.

Or a pleasantly asked favor of the neighbor to borrow a ladder, to remove those beautiful plants that are not supposed to grow out from your gutter. And let us not forget the couple hundred dollars thrown at painting any house before buying or selling. Truly there are countless repairs that are cheap or affordable and you can do yourself. 
Then the game levels up with the bigger ticket items. A noticeable crack on the side of the foundation. It is never caused you any problems before, so it does not have a reason to be a worry. As that thought crosses your mind, you begin kicking yourself.

That was one of the many petty angles you used when buying the house to negotiate a better sale price. It should be as easy to repair as anything else. Just watch a video online and make a trip to the nearest home improvement stone. Hours of videos later, the seemingly simple task has gone from kindergarten spelling to doctorate level writing.

Your undeterred confidence leads you to the home improvement store, anyway, hoping some nice, experienced gentleman will dumb the process down for you and send you on your way.

To your own demise, that is not only not the case but now your trapped in a conversation with a stranger at a stone talking about what you can only hope pertains to you anymore, considering you zoned out ten minutes ago. After many decreasingly subtle hints about needing to go, your finally able to get out. The journey was a disaster and you still have no idea how to fix this crack.

Your options have been withered down to little to none. It is time to call a professional and get this thing taken care of right now. A firm due diligence leads you to just the right contractor. A lengthy phone call with details that seemed irrelevant, this company accepts to send someone out the next week to take a look at your worrisome crack and give you a free quote.

All other repairs take a screeching halt until the price of this repair in properly defined. The day comes for the professional to look at the crack on the side of your house and you get a call, he has to reschedule to next week. Reluctantly you agree and the wait starts all over again.

The man from the company you contacted two weeks ago finally shows up. He asks you every single question that you answered two weeks ago on the phone; Self driven patience is beginning to run out. The man looks all the way around your property and finds a couple more ‘hairline’ cracks.

You do not see the relevance in such small cracks, but this is why you called a professional. After well over an hour of walking around and literally staring at the concrete around your house, he has done looking. Then the man says he must go, and he will call you with a quote tomorrow after he runs some numbers. Grinding your teeth down to the bit, you smile and thank him for his time.
The next day during the late afternoon, the man from the foundation company calls. He begins to ramble on and on with terms that you could not care to understand. An eternity later the price gets dropped on you. This man quoted you for a price that could range between three and four thousand dollars! Your heart literally skips a beat. All that money for such a little crack...

Once again you are kicking yourself for ever bringing this up when you bought the house in the first place. It will drain your bank account but needs to be done. You humbly accept the man’s offer and ask when he can start. The man says it will take about two weeks until he is free to take on just a task.
A month after the original call to get this tiny crack fixed, the job is done. You have spent more on this single repair than all other repairs combined in the last couple of years. At least it is done, and you will not have to worry about it anymore.

Unfortunately, due to the time-consuming process and financially draining expedition of repairing your home’s foundation, no other repairs have been made simultaneously. After a couple weeks of recouping your funds in your account, you are ready to begin on small repairs again. Things are starting to look good around here, maybe it is time to paint and look at selling. 
Painting has always been a long boring process that is absolutely impossible to complete in a day, especially with your busy schedule. One day after work is just moving all the furniture in one room and cleaning the walls in order to have a fresh canvas to work with.

The next day is removing floor outlet covers, coving the floor in a plastic sheet to protect from accidently splashed paint, and placing masking tape over any border of where the paint should start or end. Day three feels like real progress is starting to occur but does not look like it. You just get all the trim edged out; when did this room get so many edges?

Day four drags from day three, your tired of painting and desperately wish you have an entire free weekend to wrap all this up at once. Thankfully today you will get the primary portion of the walls painted all at once. This new color looks great, but the underlying tone tells you a second or third coat of paint is going to be necessary to achieve the color you want. Days later, this room is painted. 
After well over a week, this room is painted, and you can proudly move on to the next one. By this rate of completion, the whole house should be completely painted in three months or more. That is just going to take too long.

So your search for someone to paint for you is on. Thinking back to the pricy foundation repair, you decide that this task is simple enough to pay someone off a side job website. The hunt is easy and simple. Finding a nice middle-aged woman who claims to be the best painter in the city for the price.

She says she will knock out a room every couple of days. Her rate for her services is twenty dollars per hour. You would prefer to pay her for the job in its entirety, but you agree, and she rushes straight to work.

A single day later and she has already completed what took you four or five days by yourself. This all seems like a perfect solution until you realize she has been working almost twelve hours on the first room. This could not get any worse.
Just as any situation proves to find a way to, this one gets worse. The first room you painted on your own has sprung a leak. It has only been a day, but the damage is already growing from the ceiling and beginning to turn a brownish color.

The water dripping out was staining and rotting your carpet before you noticed and put down a pot to catch the falling dirty water. And of course the water begins to bubble the edge of such a fresh paint job. This one is easy to understand, you cannot fix a roof; Helping friends in the past made that noticeably clear. So, it is back to the internet to find someone to fix your roof and replace the inflicted ceiling damaged. 
The company you decided to call is much quicker to come right out the next day. The man grabs a ladder from his truck and scales the building without any hesitation. The next hour consisted of him walking around every square inch of your roof and not just where the leak is.

He also walked inside several times to look at the leak in question. He comes to you with a worrisome look on his face, this cannot be good. He explains that multiple shingles have been damaged from the recent storms and he deeply recommends replacing the entire roof.

You show him the door immediately and thank him for his time. A quick search online tells you the average cost to replace a roof is between five and ten thousand dollars. Ringing fills your ears as you realize that you might be stuck in this house with a leaky roof forever.
There must be another option. What about your homeowner’s insurance? The phone seems to teleport into your hand to call your insurance representative. The insurance representative is calm and collective.

Talking with the representative spells out that your roof may or may not be eligible for a new one but if it is, the deductible with be one thousand two hundred dollars. You agree, feeling as though there is no other option.   

To preserve what little savings you have left, this massive bill goes straight to the credit card. Not a move that aids your comfort, but you seem to be out of options. The insurance company sends someone out the very next day and approves your need for a new roof. 
The next few weeks is your typical busy life with way more going on. The lady painting is still painting and draining the little money you have left. She claims that it takes her longer because you do not know how to paint, you never use a primer on interior walls like she does.

This cost you money in the form of supplies and labor. Meanwhile, the men on your roof are hammering and stomping sunrise to sunset but somehow never getting anything done. Your nerves are fried and the anger inside you is bubbling to a dangerous level.

​The financial burden of all this is destroying your comfort level of owning your own home. Hoping to already be in another house months ago, the various contractors and self-repairs is taking way longer than expected. This is stressful. Maybe next time you can explore, and option involving no repairs and just sell my house fast as-is.

Sell your home AS-IS

The troubles of repairing a house before selling can obviously be an overwhelming amount of stress and financial strain. This is not to mention the fact of all the time it takes to properly repairs many projects that are likely to be out of the scope of your ‘Average Joe’. 

So, let us look at the flip side. Let us put into consideration the concept of just not repairing the property whatsoever. No contractors to deal with on a daily or weekly basis. No personal elbow grease, withering down upon the mind’s patience minute after minute. And with the utmost importance, no money to be shoveled into a dying investment. 

This is all a very real concept that happens more than one might think. Selling a home without committing to any repairs at all and selling it just how it is right now, in its present condition is called selling a property AS-IS; Or selling a property exactly as it is. No renovations, no repairs, no negotiations under the basis of lack of repairs made to the property. It is literally the simplest and easiest way to do it.

The trick is just to know who to sell a house as-is to. The run of the mill retail home buyer is not going to have the money make repairs and will not be likely to qualify for a loan from a banking institution for a property in need of excess repairs. 

What you are looking for is a Cash Buyer. Someone who will not care about the repairs needed for a multitude of reasons. Cash buyers are strictly what the name implies, a person that buys houses with cash, not credit. For this reason, a cash buyer does not need to go through a bank to purchase your property.

Cash buyers are primarily investors looking for a property to turn into a rental home or to flip for a quick profit. The worst the condition of the property, the more likely it is going to be a smarter economic decision to sell to a cash buyer. Investors in a market like this one do not care how the property looks or what magnitude of repairs is needed to bring it to a market finish state.

The only concern with a cash buyer is do the numbers work out to eventually turn this house into a lump sum of cash profit or a long-term revenue generating property. All these reasons make working with a cash buyer extremely simple and efficient. 

Finding a cash buyer, or investor, is absolutely the hardest part of the whole transaction. Typically, a cash buyer will not look at what is on the open market because those homes are already fixed up and placed for sale at top market value, leaving minimum or none for any kind of profit.

This is what they do for a living, would you go to work everyday if the company you work for just decided to not pay you anymore? Hell no! It is the same way for a cash buyer. With the added bonus of dealing with an individual. Having one on one conversations and being treated like a person, not just a case number.

Often a cash buyer is significantly more likely to work with you on what you need to make the deal happen. Things like allowing you to stay in the property for an extended period of time to get another place to live or even agreeing to make sure all your moving cost for your next home are taken care all.

​Cash buyers are truly a nicer group of people to work with in most cases. 
Ready to find a cash buyer?

 Hi,
My name is Kyle, and I am a cash buyer that wants to help in any way I can. There are not any rules that inhibit myself but one that I live by; All properties I purchase must be a win-win scenario for both the seller and I. If I cannot help you, I will get you someone who can. 
If you have a home that you need to seller, please do not hesitate to call, text, email, or fill out a form on my website. I look forward to working with you.
Best of wishes,
 -Kyle S.
(502) 200 – 9903 

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