Best Companies That Buy Houses for Cash: Honestly Reviewed

None of the companies on this page paid to be here, and none of them can. FrontPorchOffers is my own directory of vetted local cash buyers, so you should know that going in. Our listed buyers pay a flat directory fee that does not affect ranking or inclusion, and sellers pay nothing. When a sale closes with a buyer we connected you with, we may be paid part of that buyer's fee. That is the whole model. When one of the companies below is a better fit for your house than our own buyers, this page says so.

Six things actually separate these companies: what they pay as a percentage of after-repair value, what they deduct in fees, how fast they close, whether they will touch a house that needs work, whether you get one offer or several, and whether they operate in your market at all. Everything else is marketing.

The single biggest factor is the condition of your house. If your home is move-in ready and financeable, the iBuyers will usually beat the investors, because they are reselling at retail and only need a service fee. If your home needs a roof, a foundation repair, or a full cosmetic rehab, the iBuyers will either decline it or revise their offer down hard after inspection, and a local investor will pay more than any of the national brands. Sort yourself into the right category first and the list below gets a lot shorter.

Opendoor is the largest iBuyer, founded in 2014, publicly traded, and its help center says it buys in every postal code in the lower 48 states with single-family homes. You enter your address, their pricing model returns a preliminary offer within about a day, and then they send an inspector. The number you saw first is not the number you get. After inspection they revise for condition, and you either accept, take a repair credit, or walk.

The cost is a service fee deducted from your proceeds, plus standard closing costs, plus whatever repair credits come out of the inspection. Opendoor says the fee varies by market and property, and its own example works out to 5 percent. For a clean home that qualifies, the net is usually within a few percent of what you would get listing, without showings or an open house. That is a real product and it is priced fairly.

The catch is that Opendoor only competes against itself. You get one number, from one company, with no second opinion on whether it is any good. The fix costs you nothing: request an Opendoor offer and two or three local investor offers at the same time and compare the net proceeds line, not the headline price.

Offerpad runs the same playbook as Opendoor with a much smaller footprint. Its locations page lists 15 metros in 9 states, mostly in the Sun Belt, and the only Midwest ones are Columbus and Indianapolis. Founded in 2015, same algorithmic offer, same in-person inspection, same downward revision if the house shows worse than the data suggested.

Offerpad's site says it charges a 5 percent service fee plus about 1 percent in closing costs, so the fee may be close to Opendoor's. What sets it apart is flexibility: free moving services within 80 miles, a closing date you pick, typically up to 60 days after accepting, and an Extended Stay of up to three days after closing. Ask each one for the fee in dollars on your house.

If both operate in your market, get both offers. They are close enough cousins that the comparison is apples to apples, and the winner is whichever one nets you more after fees and repair credits.

HomeVestors has been around since 1996, and its 2026 franchise filing counts 862 independently owned franchise offices plus 26 run by its affiliates, in 46 states and Washington, D.C. That makes it the one name in this category most sellers already recognize. The company says it charges no commissions or service charges and pays typical closing costs. The franchise office buys the house in its own company's name and makes money on the spread between what it pays you and what the house is worth once it is fixed.

HomeVestors does not publish a percentage it pays. Its own footnote says offers are typically discounted below market value in exchange for speed and convenience, and the company says it can sometimes close in as little as three weeks. For a vacant house, a hoarder situation, an inherited property nobody wants to clean out, or a pre-foreclosure with a hard deadline, that can be a fair trade. Ask the office what it thinks the house is worth fixed up and what it budgeted for repairs, so you can see how the offer was built.

The weakness is structural. Because every franchise is independently owned, the offer you get depends entirely on who happens to own the territory where your house sits. A sharp operator in one city and a lazy one in the next city will quote the same house tens of thousands of dollars apart, and you have no way to know which one you drew. One offer from one franchisee is not a market test. It is a data point.

Sundae, founded in 2018, is the closest thing on this list to an actual auction. Instead of one company making you an offer, they list your property on a private marketplace where pre-vetted local investors bid on it, and you get multiple offers back within a few days. There is no fee to the seller. Sundae charges the buyer.

That structure is genuinely better for the seller than a single-offer model, because competition does the pricing work instead of one buyer's spreadsheet. Distressed property, inherited property, and vacant houses are their target, and those are exactly the properties where the spread between a lazy offer and a competitive one is widest.

The limit is geography. Sundae's roughly 25 markets skew West Coast, Texas, and a handful of East Coast metros, and most of the Midwest is outside their coverage. If you are in one of their cities, use them. If you are in Kansas City, Des Moines, Rockford, or Albuquerque, you need a network that actually operates there.

HomeLight's main business is matching sellers to traditional agents, and Simple Sale is the cash-offer product they bolted on to keep sellers from leaving that funnel. They match your property to an investor in their network and return a single cash offer. There is no fee to you, because HomeLight makes its money on agent referrals elsewhere.

The offer is real and it comes from a real investor, so this is not a bait product. It is useful mostly in markets where investor density is low and there is no strong local option to compare against. Expect follow-up marketing pushing you back toward listing with one of their agents, because that is the business the cash offer is feeding.

In any market with a healthy local buyer pool, a single Simple Sale offer will usually come in under what two or three competing local investors will pay for the same house.

Clever belongs on this list because sellers keep finding it while searching for cash buyers, but its core product is not a cash offer. Clever matches you to a discount agent who lists your home at a reduced 1.5 percent commission. For a move-in-ready house and a seller with time, that is a good product, and it will beat every cash offer on this page on gross price.

Clever Offers, the cash-sale side product, is a thin matching layer that routes you to one partner investor in select markets. You get a single offer and no comparison.

The honest read is that Clever and a cash-buyer directory solve different problems. If your house is financeable and you can wait 30 to 60 days for a traditional sale, list it and pay the 1.5 percent. If your house needs work, or the timeline is short, or you cannot do showings, a discount listing does not solve your problem and a single routed offer does not either.

The national brands spend heavily on advertising, and that spend comes out of the offer. A local investor buying five to thirty houses a year in one metro has lower customer acquisition cost, knows the specific neighborhood, knows which contractor will do the roof for what, and can underwrite a house the algorithms decline outright. On distressed property, that is where the best numbers come from. Most local investors aim to be all in at about 65 to 80 percent of after-repair value once repairs, holding, and closing costs are counted, so the offer itself lands below that.

The tradeoff is verification. A national brand carries a known process. A local buyer is only as good as their track record, which means you check the entity on your secretary of state site, look for real reviews, ask for proof of funds, ask how many houses they closed last year, and insist on your own title company. Anybody doing real volume answers all five without flinching.

This is the gap FrontPorchOffers was built to close. Every buyer in our directory is vetted for local presence, standing, and operating history before they are listed, and you get several of them competing on the same house instead of one at a time.

Cash buyer offers are not comparable as quoted, and the highest number frequently nets the least. Write down five things for every offer: the purchase price, the service fee, which closing costs the buyer pays and which you pay, any repair credit or holdback, and the number of days to close. Subtract everything from the price and compare that figure. That is the only number that matters.

Then read the contract for the two clauses that quietly move money. The first is the inspection or due diligence period, which is how an offer gets revised down two weeks in. The second is the assignment clause, which tells you whether the company signing your contract intends to close on it or resell it to somebody else. Neither clause is automatically bad, but you need to know which one you agreed to.

Check the earnest money too. A legitimate buyer puts real money in escrow, commonly 1 percent of the price, and often $1,000 to $5,000. An offer backed by $100 in earnest money is not an offer, it is an option to walk away that costs them nothing and costs you three weeks of selling time.

Every company on this page is built to be the only offer you get. That is the business model, and it works, because the vast majority of sellers call one number off one sign or one postcard and take what comes back. There is no penalty for getting three offers, and no cash buyer worth selling to will pull an offer because you compared it.

The spread between the first offer and the best offer on the same house, in the same week, is routinely five figures. Getting a second and third number is the highest paid hour of work available to a seller in this situation.

If your house is in one of the 17 cities we cover, enter your ZIP below and several vetted local buyers will compete for it in one place. If you are outside our footprint, use this page anyway: pick two companies above that fit your property type, get both numbers, and run the net proceeds math before you sign anything.