Updated August 25, 2026. Quick answer: A cash buyer’s pitch is that there is no commission and no fee, so the estate keeps more. We fetched the pages of 8 cash-buyer and instant-offer companies this session and asked one mechanical question of each: does it publish a price for its own service? One does. Three publish a version of zero fees, which is a true sentence about the wrong line. Four publish no figure at all. An estate has something an ordinary seller does not: in California a court-appointed referee appraises the property by statute, and a court cannot confirm a sale below 90 percent of that appraisal.
Who publishes a number, and who publishes a sentence
| Company | Type | What its own page publishes | The sentence it publishes | Pages served |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HomeGo | cash buyer | Publishes a no-fee claim | “No commissions, no closing costs” | 1/1 |
| HomeLight Simple Sale | cash buyer | Publishes no figure | — | 1/1 |
| HomeVestors (We Buy Ugly Houses) | cash buyer | Publishes a no-fee claim | “We don’t charge commissions or real estate fees of any kind.” | 2/2 |
| Knock | cash buyer | Publishes no figure | — | 1/1 |
| Offerpad | cash buyer | Publishes a price | “Offerpad charges a 5% service fee plus approximately 1% in closing costs.” | 2/2 |
| Opendoor | cash buyer | Publishes no figure | — | 1/3 |
| Orchard | cash buyer | Publishes no figure | — | 2/2 |
| Sundae | cash buyer | Publishes a no-fee claim | “Pay zero fees.” | 1/1 |
| Redfin | brokerage | Publishes a relative claim | “And you get it all for half the fee other brokerages often charge.” | 1/1 |
8 cash-buyer and instant-offer companies plus one brokerage, fetched on August 25, 2026. 2 of the documents requested returned something other than 200 and are counted as not served. The test is narrow on purpose: whether the company states a price for its own service on its own page. It is not a judgement about any company’s offer.
One company states a price. Offerpad’s own page says “Offerpad charges a 5% service fee plus approximately 1% in closing costs.” That is 6 percent of the sale price, stated by the company, on the company’s own site, before any argument about what the offer itself is worth. You can put it in a spreadsheet.
The same page describes the other side of the comparison as “Agent commissions apply (typically 5-6% of the sale price, split between buyer’s and seller’s agents).” That is a description of somebody else’s market, published by a competitor of that market. It is not a rate anyone is bound by, and in a probate sale it is not even the mechanism – the commission in a court-confirmed sale is a finding the court makes.
The rest publish claims rather than prices. HomeVestors: “We don’t charge commissions or real estate fees of any kind.” HomeGo: “No commissions, no closing costs”. Sundae: “Pay zero fees.” Opendoor’s sell page offers “Get cash upfront and keep the upside, minus our fees.” and its two fee articles returned 404 to us. Redfin, on the listing side, promises “you’ll pay half the fee other brokerages often charge” – half of an unstated number.
Zero fees is true, and it is about the wrong line
A cash buyer is not paid by the seller. It is paid by the spread between what it pays and what the house is worth, and that spread is realised later, by someone else, at a price the estate never sees. So a fee schedule of zero is accurate and tells you nothing, in the same way that a shop that does not charge an entry fee is not thereby giving away its stock.
Which means the comparison a beneficiary actually needs is not fee against fee. It is offer against value, and then costs against costs. The first half of that is where every one of these pages goes quiet, and it is the half that is worth more.
The estate holds a measuring stick most sellers never get
This is the part that makes an inherited house different from a house. In California the personal representative files an inventory and appraisal, and by statute “The probate referee shall appraise all property other than that appraised by the personal representative.” The referee is appointed by the court, not chosen by the estate, and not chosen by the buyer. It is a valuation nobody in the transaction hired.
It arrives on a schedule too. The statute gives the personal representative four months: the inventory and appraisal “shall be filed within four months after letters are first issued to a general personal representative.” So the number usually exists, or is coming, before the decision has to be made.
It also has a price, and the price is in the statute rather than in a quote. That figure, and what it does at the top and the bottom of the range, is set out on the page about what an estate pays to sell.
What the ninety percent floor forbids
In a court-confirmed sale the appraisal is not advisory. Section 10309 makes it a condition of confirmation: “The sum offered for the property is at least 90 percent of the appraised value of the property as determined by the appraisal described in paragraph (1).” Below that line the court does not weigh the offer against the circumstances. It cannot confirm it.
| Referee’s appraised value | Lowest offer a court may confirm (90%) | What the floor still allows to be given up |
|---|---|---|
| $350,000 | $315,000 | $35,000 |
| $500,000 | $450,000 | $50,000 |
| $750,000 | $675,000 | $75,000 |
| $1,000,000 | $900,000 | $100,000 |
| $1,500,000 | $1,350,000 | $150,000 |
California, court-confirmed sales only. The middle column is a floor and not a target: a sale at exactly 90 percent is a sale that parted with the right-hand column.
Two cautions on that table. It is California, and it is the confirmed-sale path only – a sale under full independent authority is not confirmed by the court at all, and the section that switches the whole mechanism off is one sentence long. And 90 percent of appraised value is a floor, not a target; a sale at the floor is a sale that gave away a tenth of the appraisal.
The tax question is not the hard part, and it is answered next door
Most of the fear about selling an inherited house is capital gains, and most of it is misplaced, because basis is “the fair market value of the property at the date of the decedent’s death”. Sell near that value and there is little gain to tax. Our inherited home sale capital gains page does that arithmetic properly and this page will not repeat it.
One rule belongs here because it changes the timing question rather than the tax one. If the property is “sold or otherwise disposed of by such person within 1 year after the decedent’s death, then such person shall be considered to have held such property for more than 1 year”. A quick sale does not create a short-term gain. So speed, whatever else it costs, does not cost you the long-term rate – which removes one of the reasons people give for taking the fast offer.
What this page does not settle
This page compares how a cash sale and a listed sale are priced, and what an estate can measure that an ordinary seller cannot. It does not tell you which to choose, and it does not price your house.
The census below covers only the companies whose own pages served us a document at 200. It is not a survey of the cash-buying market and says nothing about companies we did not fetch.
It measures one thing only: whether the company publishes a price on its own site. A company that publishes nothing may still quote you a fair number, and a company that publishes 5 percent may be the more expensive of the two once the offer price is in.
The 90 percent floor and the probate referee are California law. They are quoted here because they are the clearest published example of an estate holding an independent valuation; they are not the rule where you live unless you live there.
No discount figure appears here. We did not read a primary source that establishes how far below market cash offers land, so we do not publish one.
Sources
- 26 U.S.C. § 1014(a)(1) — https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title26-section1014&num=0&edition=prelim
- 26 U.S.C. § 1223(9) — https://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=granuleid:USC-prelim-title26-section1223&num=0&edition=prelim
- Cal. Prob. Code § 10309(a)(3) — https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PROB§ionNum=10309.
- Cal. Prob. Code § 8800(b) — https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PROB§ionNum=8800.
- Cal. Prob. Code § 8902(b) — https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PROB§ionNum=8902.
- HomeGo, home page — https://www.homego.com/
- HomeVestors, We Buy Ugly Houses — https://www.webuyuglyhouses.com/
- Offerpad, How It Works — https://www.offerpad.com/how-it-works/
- Opendoor, Sell your home — https://www.opendoor.com/sell
- Redfin, Sell a home — https://www.redfin.com/sell-a-home
- Sundae, home page — https://sundae.com/
Related: What an Estate Pays to Sell · Net Proceeds to the Estate · the decision this one comes after · what the sale does to the tax.
General information drawn from the primary statutes and published company pages named above, not legal, tax or financial advice. Statutes are amended and company terms change; the figures here are what each source said on the date above, and the section or page is linked so you can check it.