The Keyheart Cash Offer Index · 2026 Edition

What 103 Home Purchases Reveal About Who Really Sells for Cash

Everyone has a mental picture of who sells their house to a cash buyer — and it's usually wrong. So we pulled our own records from the last 12 months. Here's who actually sells, why, how fast, and what condition their homes are really in.

Finding #1: It's almost never foreclosure. It's inheritance.

The billboard stereotype of the cash-sale seller is someone in a financial emergency, days from the bank taking the house. Our data says otherwise. Foreclosure or being behind on payments accounted for just 5% of our purchases. The single largest reason, by a wide margin, was inherited property — families who ended up with a house they didn't live in, couldn't maintain, and didn't want to renovate or manage from afar.

Here's the full breakdown of why people sold to us over the last 12 months:

*"Other" is a mix — downsizing, health changes, settling an estate, or simply wanting a clean, fast exit without listing.

Put inheritance, tired landlords, and "other" together and you're looking at the majority of sellers who aren't distressed at all — they're just people for whom the traditional listing process (repairs, staging, showings, a financed buyer's 45-day escrow) doesn't fit their life. We wrote a field guide to all of these in the real reasons people sell to a cash buyer.

Finding #2: Sellers don't want a fire sale — they want certainty.

"Cash buyer" gets equated with "desperate fast sale." But when we let sellers pick any closing date they want, here's what they actually chose:

We can close in a week — we've done it in four days. But most sellers don't take the fastest option. Given the choice, they pick around 30 days, because what they actually want isn't speed for its own sake — it's a guaranteed date that won't fall through, with time to move out on their own terms. The value of a cash offer, it turns out, is certainty more than velocity. (Curious what the days between contract and closing actually involve? See what happens at a cash closing.)

Finding #3: Half of these homes couldn't have been sold the normal way.

This is the finding most sellers don't expect. About 50% of the homes we bought could not have qualified for a conventional or FHA mortgage in their as-is condition — meaning a typical buyer literally could not have financed them. The most common deal-breakers we found, in order:

1. Roof — at or past end of life
2. Foundation — movement, cracks, settling
3. Plumbing — failed or outdated supply and sewer lines

That's why "just list it" isn't always an option: when a house can't pass a lender's condition requirements, the pool of buyers who can actually close shrinks to cash. It's also why our average renovation runs about $70,000 per home — we're fixing the things that kept the house off the traditional market in the first place. You can see a real one, line by line, in what actually happens to your house after we buy it.

Finding #4: 9 out of 10 sellers leave belongings behind — and that's fine.

90% of our sellers left at least some belongings in the house for us to handle after closing — furniture, garage and attic contents, sometimes a whole house full. For people selling an inherited or long-held home from another state, not having to empty the house is often the single biggest relief of the entire process. As-is, for us, includes the contents.

Where the homes were

We buy in all 50 states, but over the last 12 months the most activity came from:

Texas · Florida · Tennessee · California · Oklahoma · Washington · North Carolina · Georgia

The bottom line

The honest takeaway from 103 purchases: most people who sell to a cash buyer aren't in crisis. They're solving a practical problem — an inherited house, a place that needs more work than it's worth, a rental they're done with, a move that can't wait. They value a certain closing date and a clean exit over squeezing out the last dollar.

And here's the part we'll say plainly, even though we can't put a precise number on it: in our experience, plenty of sellers who go the traditional route — after months of repairs, carrying costs, commissions, and fall-through risk — end up netting close to what our cash offer would have been anyway, just with far more time and stress spent getting there. For a house in good shape with no time pressure, listing still usually wins. But for the situations above, the math is a lot closer than people assume — and the headache is not.