Selling a house that needs work: assisted sale?

A property needing significant work does not fail to sell because it is unattractive. It fails because most buyers cannot borrow against it. A lender will not advance on a house with no kitchen, no working heating or a damp problem in the survey, so the pool shrinks to people buying with cash — and people buying with cash expect to be paid for the certainty they bring.

What are the actual options?

Nobody should choose between those on a description. The figure that matters is what each one puts in your hand after costs, and it is different for every property — which is why the routes on this platform are computed against the actual figures rather than described in general terms.

Certainty is not a feeling either. Roughly a third of agreed sales in England and Wales fall through, so completion probability is part of what you are being offered, and a higher price on a route that is less likely to complete is not obviously the better offer. The material information about the property has to be published before it can be marketed at all, whichever route is chosen — and where a question about it has never been answered, that is published too.

Fast cash purchase

A buyer with funds purchases as it stands, usually in two to four weeks, and takes the whole risk of the works. The discount is not arbitrary: it has to cover the transfer tax, the works, the contingency, the holding costs, the selling costs and a margin for the risk that any of those is wrong. Measured properly — as true discount, against every pound they will deploy rather than against the price alone — the buyer's position is a good deal less generous than the headline reduction suggests. On a property needing thirty thousand pounds of work, that is a large number before anybody has made a penny.

It is the right route when the certainty is the point — a probate sale with beneficiaries waiting, a repossession date, a property two hundred miles away that nobody can manage.

Assisted sale

You keep ownership. A partner funds and manages the works, the improved property is sold, and you take an agreed sum from the proceeds. Because you are no longer selling the risk of the works, you are not paying the discount that risk commands — which is why an assisted sale usually produces the highest figure of the four.

The trade is time and conditionality. Money arrives when the improved property sells, not on completion, and the figure depends on the works estimate being right and the finished value being achieved. It needs a written agreement that says what happens if either turns out otherwise, and it needs your own solicitor to read it.

Which one pays most, and which one is certain?

Almost never the same route. That is the honest shape of the answer and it is why a single headline offer tells you nothing useful. The right question is not which number is biggest but which combination of number and date solves the problem you actually have.

It is also why any offer below market value should arrive alongside what you are giving up for it — including, plainly, that an estate agent would probably get you more if the property can be marketed and you can wait. An offer presented without that comparison is not a worse offer. It is an incomplete one.

What must be told to you before you are bound

• Any fee, before you are committed to it. A fee disclosed afterwards is unenforceable without a court's permission, and a business that leaves it late is telling you something.
• Whether the buyer is connected to the person advising you, and how each of them is paid.
• What happens if the works cost more than estimated, and who carries that.
• What happens if you change your mind, and by when.
• Whether you are already tied to an agent. Under sole agency or sole selling rights that agent may be owed a fee on a sale whoever introduced the buyer, and a second fee on top means paying twice for one completion.

The last one is the one that costs people real money and it is the one nobody asks about. Check your existing agreement, and check the notice period, before signing anything else.

Take your own legal advice. Not the buyer's solicitor, not a firm the buyer recommends — your own, instructed by you, paid by you and answerable to you. On any structure where you do not receive the whole price on completion, that is not a formality.