Cash Offer Calculator

Because the buyer is taking on everything the seller would otherwise do: the repairs, the months of carrying costs, the commission on the eventual resale, the closing costs on both ends of their own transaction, and the risk that any of those numbers is wrong. All of that has to come out of the same after-repair value, and what is left over after it is the most the buyer can pay. The offer is not a lowball dressed up as arithmetic — but it is also not a favour, and a seller who does not need speed or certainty is usually better off listing.

Yes, and it is not rare. Three things push it that way: repairs a lender will require before it will fund a conventional buyer, a long expected time on market at a real monthly carrying cost, and a commission plus concession load in the seven-to-eight percent range. On a house needing serious work in a slow market, the repair bill and six months of payments, taxes and insurance can close most of the gap on their own. Enter the honest numbers on both sides below rather than assuming either answer — that is the entire reason this tool shows both.

It is the price the house would have to actually close at on the open market for the seller to end up with the same money as the cash offer, after commission, seller-side closing costs, concessions, the repairs required to list, and every month of carry until it closes. It is the single most useful number in this comparison, because it converts a hard question — is this offer fair? — into an easy one: do I believe this house closes above that price? A seller who does should list. A seller who is unsure has their answer.

Honestly, and separately from the dollars. A cash sale removes the appraisal, the loan underwriting, the buyer's own house selling first, and most of the inspection renegotiation — the four things that turn a signed contract back into a listing at week six, after the seller has already moved or bought elsewhere. That risk is real and it is not on either column of this comparison. What the calculator can tell you is the size of the discount you are paying for it. Whether that number is worth it depends on facts the calculator does not have.

The percentage is an output, not an input, and this tool shows it as one. It falls out of the repair bill and the buyer's cost-and-profit assumption, so on a lightly worn house it can be in the mid-eighties and on a full gut it can be in the fifties — the same buyer, the same margin, wildly different percentages. A rule of thumb in the seventies is a screening filter for a buyer looking at a hundred addresses. It is not a valuation, and a seller should not accept or reject an offer because of where it lands against one.

The mortgage payments, taxes, insurance and utilities that keep running for every month the house is listed, under contract and waiting to close — which is the whole holding line below, and it is usually the largest forgotten number. After that: the pre-listing repairs a lender or an inspector will require, which are not the same as a full rehab but are not nothing; seller-paid closing costs and transfer taxes; buyer concessions, which have become routine again; and the cost of staging, cleaning and storage while the house shows.