Most sellers never get a straight answer about what their house is worth. They get a list price, which is a guess about what someone might pay months from now, and it says nothing about what reaches your account after everything comes off the top. Here is what you get instead.
A $200,000 List Price Is Not $200,000 in Your Pocket
Gross and net are two different numbers, and the gap is wider than most sellers expect. Commission on a house here usually runs 5 to 6 percent. Ohio's conveyance fee sits on top of that, and in Summit County it works out to $4 for every $1,000 of the sale price, customarily paid by you. Then add title and escrow fees, whatever repair credit the buyer negotiates after their inspection, and the taxes, insurance, and utilities you keep paying while the house sits.
You give us the address. We pull the last twelve months of closed sales in your township and put every one of those costs on one page, next to a cash number, so you're comparing what actually lands in your account either way.
Told to Fix the Kitchen and the Roof Before Anyone Will List It
Plenty of sellers hear a version of the same speech. Update the kitchen, replace the roof, repaint the trim, then we'll put a sign in the yard. The advice isn't wrong. It just assumes you've got that money sitting in an account, and most people don't.
There's a second round of it waiting after you accept an offer. If your buyer is using an FHA loan and the house went up before 1978, federal rules make the appraiser write up peeling, chipping, or flaking paint anywhere inside or out, and it has to be corrected before that loan funds. We price the house the way it stands today. No repairs, no paint, no cleanout.
Getting Sued Six Months After Closing Over Something You Never Knew About
Ohio asks most sellers of residential property to fill out a Residential Property Disclosure Form covering what they know about the foundation, the roof, the plumbing, water in the basement, and more. You sign it, you miss something, and a buyer who finds it a year later has somewhere to start.
Estate sales work differently. Under that same law, a sale made by the executor handling a parent's estate is exempt from the form, which matters a great deal when you're selling a house you never lived in and have never once been down in the crawlspace. Selling as-is for cash changes the shape of that risk too. Condition gets priced into the offer up front instead of turning up in somebody's inspection report afterward.
An Inherited House Nobody Can Price and Nobody Can Sell Yet
Heirs are usually the last people to find out what the house is worth, and in Ohio that number decides which door the estate walks through. Release from administration is the shorter probate route. It applies when the estate comes to $35,000 or less, or $100,000 or less where a surviving spouse inherits everything, and real property counts toward that total when it passes through the estate.
So a house that appraises at $30,000 and one that appraises at $50,000 can send the same family down two very different paths. Getting a defensible number early isn't busywork. It shapes the filings, the timeline, and how long the estate stays open.
Cash Buyers Who Lowball You at Half What the House Is Worth
That reputation got earned. A lot of companies run your address through software, fire back a number, and never explain where it came from. You shouldn't accept a figure you can't see the work behind.
Ours arrives with the closed sales we compared your house to, in your township, and the reason each one belongs in the set. If the comparable sales are thin, or your house is unusual enough that they don't tell you much, you'll hear that too.
And sometimes the honest answer is that listing it beats our offer. A house in good shape, in a neighborhood where buyers are competing, will often clear more on the open market even after commission. When that's what the math says, that's what we say, and you keep the valuation for free.
