Cash offers on Bay Area houses, explained by somebody who used to close them

For twenty-six years I was an escrow officer on the Peninsula and in the South Bay, most of it from an office off El Camino in San Mateo. The cash deals that came across my desk were for wholesalers, for flippers with one truck and a cousin who did drywall, for landlords, and for family offices that bought four houses a month without looking at any of them. I'm semi-retired now. This site is where I write down what I learned, mostly for people who just got a call from a stranger offering to buy their house.

Here's the frame. A mechanic hands you a repair estimate; you don't need to know how to rebuild a transmission to read it. What you need is to know what the line items mean, which of them are padded, and whether the shop is licensed. A cash offer is that kind of document. There's a structure to it, and the structure isn't secret. Once you can see it, a lazy offer looks different from a fair one.

Where I name a buyer, I describe what their pages say and stop there. we-buy-houses-in-bay-area.com says it connects Bay Area homeowners with local cash buyers, buys as-is, charges no agent commission, lets you pick the closing date, and lets you turn the offer down. That is what the site says. I can't check the rest, and neither can you until you have a written offer in hand.

Where I can, I point you to a public source instead of my memory. The California DRE consumer information is where you check whether the person calling holds a license. The FTB page on real estate withholding explains the money escrow may hold back at closing, which surprised about half the sellers I ever sat across from. And C.A.R.'s market data is where any argument about comparable sales starts.

Everything here is general information from someone who used to close these deals, not legal or tax advice.

Three pieces so far.

How a Bay Area cash offer is actually calculated. After-repair value, minus repairs, minus the buyer's resale costs, minus their margin. I work through a Redwood City example with a bad roof and a worse foundation.

Reading the cash purchase contract line by line before you sign. Earnest money, the inspection window, the assignment clause, who pays transfer tax in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and the lines that made most of the trouble in my office.

Wholesalers, iBuyers, local buyers: who is on the other end of the phone. The kinds of cash buyer, how to tell them apart in one call, and a short script for the first few questions.

If you only read one, read the contract piece. The arithmetic in a cash offer was almost never where a seller got hurt. It was a clause they skimmed, usually about the deposit or about who the buyer was allowed to hand the contract to.

Tom Kessler closed cash transactions as an escrow officer in San Mateo for twenty-six years. He reviews the cash-offer process the way a mechanic reads a repair estimate.