Ask around and you'll hear one number for what cash buyers pay: about half of a home's value. The real picture is a range, and a house's condition is what decides where inside it you land. We pulled 45 real cash deals with a full valuation to show how the pricing actually works, and why the same buyer will pay 50% for one house and 80% for the one next door.
The figure you see repeated online is 50% of value. It's a useful anchor, and it happens to be close to the median here, but treating it as the number hides most of the story. Across 45 deals where the team had a full after-repair valuation (ARV, what the home would sell for once completely fixed up), offers ran from under half of ARV all the way to more than 80%. Just over half the deals, 23 of the 45, came in at 50% of ARV or better.
The spread tracks one thing: how much work each house needed. The houses that landed under 50% were the ones that needed nearly everything. The ones that reached 80% or more were close to move-in ready.
The honest answer to "how much do cash buyers pay" is another question: what condition is the house in?
A cash offer is really one piece of arithmetic. Start with the ARV. Subtract what the repairs will cost. Subtract the cost of buying, holding, and reselling the house. Subtract the margin the buyer needs to make the risk worth taking. Whatever's left is the offer. Repairs are the line that swings the hardest, so the more work a house needs, the further the offer drops below its finished value.
Here's the same $200,000 house in two different conditions, to show how far that one line moves the result.
Repairs are the single biggest reason two houses that look alike from the curb get very different offers.
You can put a rough band on your own house before you ever call a buyer, just by being honest about its condition. These bands come from the same 45 deals. They're a starting point, not a quote.
Roof, mechanicals, kitchen, and baths are all due, or the house needs a full gut. This is the single biggest group in our 45 deals, which is why the median lands near 50%.
Everything works, it just looks tired. Cosmetic updates plus one or two bigger-ticket items like a furnace or a roof nearing the end.
Mostly cosmetic. Paint, flooring, maybe a light kitchen refresh. A buyer can turn it around fast and cheap, so the offer sits close to full value.
Location, how fast homes are selling in your area, and what a buyer already has going in the neighborhood all push the number around too. Condition is just the lever that moves it the most.
A cash offer will almost always look low next to your Zestimate. The model can't see your roof, your furnace, or your dated kitchen, so on a house that needs work it prices you like the fixed-up homes nearby, much closer to ARV than to what your house would bring today as-is. Held up against a fully-renovated value, any as-is offer looks brutal.
The comparison that actually tells you something is net against net. On one side: what a cash sale would put in your pocket, with no repairs, no agent commission, and no months of carrying the house. On the other: what you'd truly net on the open market after all of that. Sometimes the cash number wins, especially on a house that needs real work. Sometimes it doesn't. You only find out by running both.
There's a bigger risk in a cash sale than the price: the one buyer you found might never close. That's the case for getting more than one offer, and it's the whole reason FrontPorchOffers is a directory of vetted local buyers instead of a single-buyer funnel.
See what multiple buyers would offer →Data: 45 contracted or closed cash deals from an active, SEO-driven home-buying pipeline (2024 to 2026) for which the team had recorded a full after-repair value (ARV). The percentage is the written cash offer divided by that ARV. ARV is the estimated fully-renovated resale value, not the home's current as-is worth. This is a self-selected subsample of a larger book of business; deals without a recorded ARV are excluded.
The offer math: The two-column $200,000 example illustrates how repairs, costs, and margin combine to produce an offer. Those figures are illustrative, chosen to show the mechanism, and are not averages from the dataset.
Privacy: Fully aggregated and anonymized. No addresses, names, or figures tied to any individual property or person are used or disclosed.
Limits: 45 deals is a small sample from one operation weighted toward the Midwest, so treat the bands as directional, not a national constant. Condition here is inferred from repair scope rather than scored on a formal scale, and repair cost is also a direct input to the offer, so the two are linked by design. This report is for information only, not legal or financial advice.