A new breed of lenders are helping everyday people make cash offers to buy houses. Cash offers carry payday loans Texas clout and sellers are more likely to accept them over offers from people who need a mortgage.
Now, it used to be only wealthy people and investors had the money to pull that off, but now maybe you can too. NPR’s Chris Arnold reports.
CHRIS ARNOLD, BYLINE: Nicole Howson and her partner spent the pandemic cooped up in a small rental apartment with their two kids, so they decided it was time to buy a house.
And that really democratizes access to cash offers
ARNOLD: The family was looking to buy a place near Atlanta, and they bid on one that just seemed perfect.
HOWSON: I was, like, praying for two days. Like, God, please let this be the one. And no, that offer did not get accepted either
ARNOLD: Meaning that they can show they already have the money. They don’t need to qualify for a mortgage. Howson has a job selling cosmetics and does not have a big pile of cash. But then she got a new realtor with a company called Better real estate, and he said that they had this new program that would let her make one of those strong cash offers too. The company would front her that big pile of money.
HOWSON: At first, I was skeptical. I was like, so you are telling me that if I want the house, you guys are just going to buy it for me, and I’m going to pay you back? He’s like, yeah. I mean, you find a house, you put in the offer, and then we buy it, and we sell it back to you.
ARNOLD: This is a pretty new thing. Howson asked her sister-in-law, who’s a realtor, and she’d never even heard of it.
ARNOLD: But she read over the materials, and it turns out it’s a real thing. What’s happening is that about a quarter of all sales now are cash, and that puts regular people at a disadvantage because it can take a long time to go through the whole mortgage underwriting process, get an appraisal. Things can fall apart.
So some companies have come up with this fix where they say they’ll buy the house with cash and wrap up the loan part with you later. Tom Willerer is with Opendoor, another company that’s doing this.
TOM WILLERER: Cash offers were traditionally reserved for the few that can afford to make a cash offer. And now, you can use our cash to back your offer.
ARNOLD: And it helps the companies, too. They make money in different ways – traditional realtor commissions or other fees. And the more people they help win bids, the more money they make. Christian Wallace is the executive in charge of the new cash offer program at Better real estate.
CHRISTIAN WALLACE: Buyers, when they are coming to the table with a cash offer, they are four times more likely to win the bid on the homes that they want.
ARNOLD: Nicole Howson says before she could make the cash offer with Better, the company wanted to make sure that she could really afford it and qualify for a mortgage.
ARNOLD: And the companies have another guardrail in all this – they don’t let you offer more than they think the house is worth. Shaival Shah is the founder and CEO of Ribbon home, another cash offer company.
SHAIVAL SHAH: We have models and algorithms running in the background that will predict the value of the house. So same day, everything is fully approved, ready to make a cash offer. So it’s really, really, really fast.
HOWSON: This house was the first cash offer that I put in, and it won. And I was like, oh, thank God. It was like this big weight lifting off of my chest. I was just so happy; very happy.
ARNOLD: Finance experts say you definitely want to look at the fine print. Different companies have different fees and rules. But for Howson, she got a good mortgage rate and no extra fees. And now, it’s time to start replacing the bathroom and kitchen floors.
HOWSON: Yeah. We’ve been doing a lot of renovations, so (laughter). But it’s like, really? Right now you choose to start pounding on the bathroom floor?
Copyright © 2021 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information.
That’s why sellers love those cash offers
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability ming is the audio record.