How fast can a cash house buying company actually buy your house?

With a standard house sale taking anything from four to six months, and often a lot longer, it’s easy to see why people turn to cash house buyers for a quick sale. A cash house sale can usually go through in three or four weeks, which is ideal if you need to sell your house fast for financial reasons, such as avoiding repossession, or personal reasons like divorce.

The other issue with the Monopoly game of a standard house sale, is that as many as one in three sales fall through, sending you right back to Go and adding even more months to the process. This makes the certainty of a cash sale very attractive, on top of the speed of the transaction.

But how fast can a cash house buyer actually sell your house? Just like so many elements of the cash house buying process, you won’t be surprised to learn that for many of the less reputable companies, a cash house sale is nowhere near as fast as they would have you believe.

How fast can a cash house buying company actually buy your house

False promises

Using a cash buyer will normally be a lot quicker than a standard sale on the open market. The problem is that because the cash house buying market is so hugely competitive, some companies make promises of a sale that is even faster than this. Promises that they simply cannot keep. Cash house buyers do offer a much faster service, but they are not miracle workers.

The Guru did a quick Google search and found a range of quick cash house sale timescales on offer, from the reasonable to the frankly ridiculous. We found that the claims generally range from 7 to 21 days, although some jokers were claiming to be able to buy your house in as little as 48 hours. This is almost impossible, and even if it were, it could never be achieved without a substantial price reduction – and by substantial, we mean around 50% of the value of your home!

A reality check

If you’ve ever bought or sold a house, you’ll know just how much time it takes to negotiate the labyrinth of legal issues, the endless surveys and searches,, and the mountain of forms that need filling in. You would have to work almost flat out for 48 hours to get through it all that fast!

Even an experienced cash house buyer, using tried and tested quick sale solicitors and surveyors, cannot make a genuine sale happen as fast as some companies claim. Unfortunately, by the time you realise that their fantastic offer was just that – a complete fantasy – you’ll already be tied in, probably by a binding contract.

This is why the Guru recommends that you avoid any cash house buyer who claims you can sell your home in under 7 days

The timeframes of a traditional home sale

To understand the complexities of a quick house sale for cash, you need to understand how a traditional open market sale works. This involves a number of stages, each of which takes several weeks to complete.

Preparation

Unless you live in a show home, chances are you’ll need to spend some time and money sprucing up your home and getting it ready for market. This can range from minor repairs and decorating, to major refurbishments to kitchens and bathrooms that can cost thousands of pounds and take many weeks to complete.

Pre Listing (2-3 weeks)

Once it’s ready, the first step in selling a home is to find a local estate agent to market your property. You’ll need to meet with a number of prospective agents and discuss price and service with them. You’ll also have to put aside time for the agents to visit and value your property, and this has to be fitted in to both their schedules and your own.

Once you’ve chosen your agent, you have to formally instruct them. Estate agency is heavily regulated and there is a lot of paperwork and compliance checks to go through before they can start selling your house.

Next the agent will need to arrange for a photographer to visit to take photographs and complete a floor plan for the listing. Once the listing has been completed, you have to approve it before it can be uploaded to the property websites and printed in brochures.

Remember, this all has to be completed before you can even start the clock on your sale. This pre-sale process can take two to three weeks – in which time you could have already sold your home to a cash house buyer and have your money in the bank.

Time to get a sale agreed (4-8 weeks)

Seeing your property go live on Rightmove and appear in the window of your high street estate agent can be very exciting. You’ll be full of anticipation, thinking that a buyer could come along at any minute – and it is possible that they might. Unfortunately, it is just as likely that you could face a long and frustrating wait.

The first few weeks will often see a flurry of activity, especially if the property has been priced right. But by the time you have sifted out the curious (or rather nosey), the tyre-kickers and the dreamers who are simply not in a position to buy, genuine prospects may still be few and far between.

The sales process can take anything from a few weeks to a few months, and there will be many false starts and failures along the way before you get a genuine offer on your home. A good rule of thumb is to expect it to take around 12 weeks to find a buyer, but it’s often a lot longer than this.

Chain chaos

Most estate agents will not let you view or offer on properties until you have a buyer for your own. At this point, chances are you’ll enter into a chain, with several other buyers and sellers. Each one has to find a buyer for their home and a property they want to move to. This chain will only move as fast as its slowest link, so if there’s a delay anywhere along the line, it will delay everyone.

Only around 10% of property purchases in the UK are chain free so if you’re not using a cash house buying company, chances are you’re going to be linked to lots of other buyers and sellers.

Conveyancing (8-12 weeks)

Eventually, once everyone in the chain has agreed their sale, it’s time to involve the solicitors. And you just know that is not going to speed anything up! Just like estate agents, this involves a whole bunch of checks and paperwork before they can even get started. Once they do get going, the searches, forms and formalities can take anything up to 12 weeks or more.

The longer the chain, the more chance of delays and the more chance that it will break completely at some point, taking your sale and all the others down with it. Even without any problems, the longer the chain, the more parties and solicitors there are involved, so the longer it will take to get your home sold.

Complications and fall throughs

As if the selling process wasn’t already lengthy enough, you need to be prepared for the clock to restart at any time. Selling your home can feel like a game of Monopoly, and you can find yourself picking up the ‘Go Back to Old Kent Road’ card at any time, sending you right back to the start. This not only sets you back in terms of time, it can also cost you thousands of pounds each time you lose your sale. With a cash buyer, you lose this uncertainty, with a guaranteed sale in just a few weeks.

How fast can I sell to a cash house buyer?

When you choose to sell to a cash buyer, you lose whole chunks of the above process, cutting months off the time it takes you to sell your home. The list of things that you don’t have to do (and you don’t have to pay for) will be a huge relief.

For a start, you don’t need to do anything to your home to make it ready for the sale. Cash house buyers will buy your home ‘as is’, warts and all, saving you time and money from the start.

You don’t need to instruct an agent and prove your identity, you don’t need to have your home photographed and measured, and you don’t have to approve any details for the websites.

Best of all, there’s no need to keep your house ‘viewer ready’ for weeks on end, and no need to suffer the indignity of people viewing and criticising your home.

It’s like getting an ‘Advance to Go’ card in Monopoly. You miss out a whole bunch of tiresome steps and you avoid the risk of landing on an expensive problem along the way.

Go straight to offer

House buying companies are geared for speed. After your initial phone call they’ll get straight to work on valuing your property. Each company will have a slightly different process for this, but most will ask you to send them as many details and photos as possible for them to work with.

They will then speak to local estate agents and carry out their own research. They’ll often give you an approximate offer on the phone, and once they have valued your property, they’ll usually make you a formal offer within 24-48hours.

If you accept the offer, your sale is agreed. Simple as that! No months of waiting, no chains, no fall throughs, just a single, solid offer for a quick sale of your home.

For more information on how cash house buyers value your property you can read our article here.

Conveyancing (1-3 weeks)

Of course, even a quick sale has to go through conveyancing, and here is where the so-called 48hour sales start to look a bit dodgy. Cash House Buying companies do have some cards up their sleeve to make conveyancing as fast as possible, but they can’t side-step it completely. Here are a few of the shortcuts they can take to get you round that Monopoly board a bit faster:

They can speed things up by booking their survey straight away, with a surveyor who has a track record of fast work.
They don’t rely on conventional lending so they don’t have to go through a standard mortgage application.

They use solicitors that have worked on these cases many times before so they know how to get things done fast.
They often indemnify, or insure against, the searches, so they don’t have to wait for them.

It’s worth noting that while the buyer’s operation may be a well-oiled machine, your own solicitors need to move just as fast to make a quick home sale work. Often the company buying your house will recommend a solicitor who they know can get the job done quickly, and this is well worth considering. However, you should never be forced to use their solicitors, as this can be a sign that they have something to hide. If this is the case, then you should walk away and find a different cash buyer.

Further Reading: 7 steps to avoid being scammed by a cash house buyer

Can a Cash House Buyer actually buy a house in 7 days?

Despite there being many companies out there claiming that you can sell your house in 7 days, in actual fact this is very rare and highly unlikely.

For this to happen, you’d have to have your solicitor instructed and ready to start working on the case from day one. The house buyer would also have to seriously cut corners, such as not getting a survey. This is a very risky move, and not one that any legitimate house buying company would make. They would have no idea what they were getting themselves into.

The only way that a sale without survey can work is if the cash buyer significantly reduces their offer to cover the risks involved. This can cut the offer price to as little as 50% of the value, which is a huge price to pay to save yourself just two or three weeks!

The truth about fast cash house sales

As we have shown, the house selling process is a long and complicated one, whichever way you go about it. And while cash house buyers will have systems in place to shorten the process, there are still some steps that they have to take as a responsible buyer, and these cannot be avoided unless the offer price is ridiculously low.

This means that any company that promises you a completion in seven days, for 80%, is highly unlikely to deliver on this promise. And a 48hour completion is even more pie-in-the-sky.

If you’re looking to sell to a genuine cash buying company, you should expect the process to take around 2-3weeks. Remember, this is still significantly faster than the 6-9moths it can take to complete a sale on the open market. Chances are your bank, your former partner or your siblings who are sharing your inheritance, will be happy to wait just a few weeks for you to get the best possible price on your quick sale.

If you want to know which house buyers actually do deliver on their promises, you can find our list of top rated house buyers by clicking on the button below.

See our list of top rated cash buyers

Cash House Buyer Guru