The First Thing We Tell You Is Usually Not a Number
On a Philadelphia fire file the first useful thing is almost always the city position, not the price. Whether a notice has been posted, what designation it carries, and whether a 6 day appeal window is running.
We raise that before price because it has a deadline and price does not, and because an owner who misses it can end up with a city-ordered demolition billed against the property at upward of $30,000. That outcome is worse for you than any offer you will receive, including a bad one.
Why Lead With the Deadline Rather Than the Offer?
What We Buy
Fire-damaged property across every Philadelphia neighbourhood, in any condition from smoke to bare shell to cleared lot. Rows, twins, detached, and multi-unit. Properties with open L&I notices, unpaid tax, water debt and violation history. Claims open, settled, denied and uninsured. Owner-occupied, tenanted, vacant and inherited.
Where we decline it is geography. Outside the city limits — Delaware County, Montgomery County, Camden across the river — different rules and a different transfer tax apply, and we are the wrong buyer.
How the Number Is Built
Finished value of a house on that lot, less the cost of getting there, less what the property owes, less the transfer tax, less carrying cost, less margin.
Three lines make Philadelphia offers differ and all three are checkable. What the property owes, which a buyer either pulled or did not. The transfer tax, which at 4.578% combined is larger than most buyers' models assume and which many still calculate at the old 4.278% rate. And the party wall position, which decides whether a clearance is a one-wall job, a two-wall job or none at all.
Why Do Philadelphia Offers Vary So Widely?
Where Our Interests Diverge From Yours
We are the buyer. Not an adviser, not neutral. We benefit if you accept less and if you decide quickly.
Everything on this site is checkable against a public source and we name them for that reason: Licenses and Inspections for the file, the Department of Revenue for the transfer tax, the Department of Records for deeds, the tax and water accounts for what is owed. Do not take our word for any of it.
We are also not brokers, not public adjusters, not contractors, not contract assigners and not lawyers. That last one matters here, because the appeal window is a legal question with a 6 day fuse and it is not something a buyer should be advising you on.
When a Different Buyer Is the Right One
A rehabber, where the brick shell survived. Somebody who will actually build inside the shell values it more than a buyer pricing a clearance, and on an end-of-row property with sound masonry they should win.
The owner next door. On a mid-block row home, a neighbouring owner avoids the party wall problem that makes your property expensive for everyone else. They can rationally pay more than we can.
Nobody — repair it. Where the shell is sound and the repair sits below finished value, restoring and listing nets more, and filing a permit also demonstrates action on any open city file. Our written figure says so when the numbers point there.
Why Tell Me to Sell to Somebody Else?
Reaching Us
Send an address through any form on this site. Before you deal with us, run the three checks on our page about how to tell local cash buyers apart. They are the same checks we would want run on anyone buying our property.