If you own a home these days you’re increasingly lucky in a lot of ways. If you bought before the recent interest rate hikes, you’re probably sitting on a nice, low rate that makes current buyers seethe with jealousy. And considering that there’s a lack of available homes to buy (the housing deficit in the U.S. is estimated to remain between 1-2 million for the foreseeable future), your property is worth more and more every day.
This explains a common experience among homeowners: The unsolicited call, text, or piece of mail offering to buy your house even though it isn’t listed for sale. A lot of homeowners are surprised when these start rolling in, because they assume you have to officially list your house to sell it—but of course you can sell your home at any time, to anyone, for any price (well, your lender might have something to say about the price, but as long as you can pay off your mortgage you can do what you want).
If you have no plans to sell your home but the convenience of a buyer just showing up and handing you a bag of cash for the place is appealing, however, you should think twice: There are three big reasons you should never respond to an unsolicited offer on your house.
Scams
Reason number one to ignore unsolicited real estate offers: They might be scams. Pretty much any time someone contacts you with an offer that seems too easy or too profitable to be true, it is. A few ways scammers utilize cold calling like this include:
Up-front fees. They’ll tell you that they have a nice cash offer on your house, but you have to pay some administrative fees to get the ball rolling. No legitimate real estate professional will ask you for an up-front fee.
Bank details. Some scammers are in it for your bank details, which they tell you they need in order to do a wire transfer. Instead, of course, they use the information to drain your accounts.
Title. Sometimes the scammers lure you in with a “cash offer” that turns out to be an offer to sell your house on your behalf—and then they ask you to sign over the title to them to facilitate the process. They then legally own your home, and can do whatever they want with it.
It’s always hard to tell if an unsolicited call is a scam—so your best bet is to just ignore them.
Lowball offers
Most unsolicited real estate offers aren’t outright scams—but that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea. One big reason is simple: An unsolicited offer is usually going to be a lowball offer that won’t get you the most money for your property. That’s because these offers come from three main groups of people:
Wholesalers. Wholesalers enter into purchase contracts on properties, then turn around and sell the house to a third party. Sometimes they already have a buyer for your home, sometimes they just think finding one will be easy. In either case, they’re going to lowball you on the sale price because they need to make a profit. If your home can get $250,000 on the market, they will offer you $200,000 and hope to make $50k in profit. They hope that the convenience of getting an unsolicited offer will tempt you into making an “easy” sale.
Flippers. You’re probably familiar with the concept of house-flipping, where investors buy run-down properties for cheap, renovate them quickly, and sell them before they get too deep into mortgage payments. You might assume flippers always target foreclosures, but they also do cold-call outreach if your neighborhood is desirable—and it’s the nature of their business to lowball you on the price in order to maximize their profits.
Individual buyers. Sometimes that unsolicited offer comes from someone who legitimately wants to buy your house for themselves. Homes are expensive these days—the median home price is about $413,000—so some folks try to beat the market by making unsolicited lowball offers in the hope that the current owner just jumps at it instead of doing their due diligence.
Even if the buyer isn’t trying to scam you—and even if they make a fair offer on the property—you still might lose out because the unsolicited offer prevents any bidding wars that might drive up the price of your home and increase your profit on the sale. If an unsolicited offer makes you decide to sell your home, you’ll probably make more money if you list it.
Sketchy agents
A third reason to ignore all unsolicited real estate calls is because responding to one forces you to work with someone you know nothing about. They may not be licensed real estate professionals at all, and might encourage you not to involve a real estate pro in order to avoid their fees, or pressure you to work with their team to close the sale. In other words, they’ll appeal to your greed.
Bypassing a real estate agent can save you some money, but it also leaves you without their expert guidance and knowledge of both the market and the law—and leaves you reliant on some rando who called you out of the blue for your information. If the unexpected offer is appealing, you should seek the advice of a professional and research the entity making the offer to understand if they’re on the up-and-up or sketchy AF.
If an unsolicited call about selling your house makes you think it might be the right move, you’ll almost always do better by going through the usual process of selling your home. An unsolicited offer indicates your home is valuable, so you’ll probably get a better offer from the open market, and working with a legit real estate agent who understands your market will also probably maximize your profit even when fees are taken into consideration. Just like everything in life, the easy route is rarely the best one.