Everyone writes about how much cash home buyers pay. Almost no one shows what actually happens when a homeowner tries to sell to one. We pulled the real pipeline data from an active home-buying operation, 3,725 seller leads, 281 written offers, and roughly 19 closed sales, to find out how often it works, why it fails, and what the offers looked like.
Of 3,725 homeowners who asked a cash buyer for an offer, 281 got one in writing, 50 signed a contract, and roughly 19 closed. The drop-off is steep, and as the next chart shows, the most common recorded reason had nothing to do with the seller.
We looked at the reasons the acquisition team logged when a lead died (the top six are below, and not every dead lead got a tag). The most common one, by a wide margin, was that a buyer couldn't be found for the house. Like most "we buy houses" operations, this one buys some homes directly and assigns others to an end investor, so "no buyer found" means no investor's numbers worked for that particular house.
A single cash buyer is a single point of failure. If their numbers don't work on your house, the deal is dead, even when you were ready to sell.
How much a cash offer lands at depends almost entirely on the home's condition. Across the 45 deals with a full after-repair valuation (ARV), offers ranged from under 50% of ARV on houses that needed heavy work to more than 80% on homes that were close to move-in ready. The median sat near 50%, mostly because the homes people bring to a cash buyer skew toward the ones that need real work.
These numbers need context, or they mislead. ARV is not the home's current, as-is worth; it's what the house would sell for once completely fixed up. The offer has to absorb the repairs, the holding costs, and the risk the resale doesn't go to plan, so the more work a house needs, the lower the offer lands against its finished value. Measured against the renovated value the gap can look enormous. Measured against what the house is worth today, in its actual condition, it narrows, though this dataset doesn't include as-is valuations, so we can't say by how much.
This is why comparing a cash offer to your Zestimate feels brutal. The honest comparison is net against net: what you'd actually pocket after repairs, commissions, and months of holding costs on a traditional sale.
Deep dive: how much cash buyers actually pay, broken down by condition.
The homes that drew offers skewed Midwestern, with a coastal tail. Among properties that received an offer, the leading states were:
The data says the biggest risk in a cash sale is the one buyer you found failing to perform, leaving you back at square one with weeks lost. When several vetted buyers look at the same house, one buyer's numbers not working no longer ends the sale by itself. That's a structural argument, not something this dataset can prove.
That's the entire reason FrontPorchOffers exists as a directory instead of a single-buyer funnel: so a homeowner gets real offers from more than one vetted local buyer and picks, rather than betting the sale on a single phone call.
See what multiple buyers would offer →Data: 3,725 homeowner seller leads from an active, SEO-driven cash home-buying pipeline (2024 to 2026). "Offer" = a written cash offer logged in the CRM. "Under contract" = a signed purchase agreement. "Closed" = a completed transaction per the operation's own profit-and-loss records. The $120,000 median offer is across all 281 written offers. Pricing-vs-value figures reflect the 45 contracted or closed deals for which the team had recorded a full after-repair value (ARV), a self-selected subsample; ARV is the estimated fully-renovated resale value, not the home's current as-is worth.
Privacy: Fully aggregated and anonymized. No addresses, names, or figures tied to any individual property or person are used or disclosed.
Limits: This is one operation's book of business, weighted toward the Midwest, not a national census. Not every lead was a committed seller; the funnel measures everyone who inquired, not only serious sellers. "Reasons deals died" are as tagged by the acquisition team at the time, and not every dead lead got a tag. The closed count is approximate: roughly 19 per profit-and-loss reconciliation, since CRM stage dates overstate closings. Treat the shape of the funnel as directional, not a universal constant. This report is for information only, not legal or financial advice.