Claim One: We Buy as Principal and Take Title
Meaning we own what we buy rather than selling the contract to somebody else before closing.
How to check it: the county Recorder of Deeds indexes every conveyance by grantee. Search our entity name and you will see what we have taken title to. A party that assigns contracts rather than buying leaves a much thinner trail, because their name is on far fewer deeds than their marketing implies.
Claim Two: Nothing Is Charged to You
No fee, no commission, no deduction, no charge for a figure and none for declining one. We make money on the difference between what we pay and what the finished property is worth, less the cost of getting there.
How to check it: read whatever we send you and look for a line taking anything from your side. There should not be one, and if there is, you have caught us in something worth walking away from.
Claim Three: We Are Not Brokers
We do not market property on behalf of others, so we do not need and do not hold a real estate licence.
How to check it: Pennsylvania publishes a free licence lookup. The useful use of it is the reverse of the obvious one. If a party is marketing your property to a list of other buyers, they are brokering and they need a licence. Look them up.
Why Does That Distinction Matter to Me?
Claim Four: We Will Tell You When Somebody Else Should Buy It
On pre-war stock here, where framing survives fire better than people expect, a rehabber pricing a repair can pay closer to finished value than we can pricing a rebuild. On a straightforward lot in a strong neighbourhood, a local builder with crews nearby can outbid us. Where the repair sits below finished value, doing it yourself keeps the whole margin.
How to check it: get a second and third figure and see whether what we told you matches what happened. This is the claim we most want tested, because a negotiation running three weeks toward a number that was never competitive costs us more than a short email does.
Claim Five: We Will Not Touch Your Catastrophic Loss Filing
It is your application, made to the county, free, and it belongs to you whether or not we ever buy anything.
How to check it: ask us to handle it and we will decline and tell you where to file instead. Anyone in a purchase conversation offering to take that off your hands is entangling something that should stay separate, and the six-month window is set out on our page covering the six-month clock.
Claim Six: We Are Not On Your Side
The one claim that is not flattering and the one most worth believing. We are the buyer. Not an adviser, not neutral. We benefit if you accept less and decide sooner.
How to check it: you cannot, and that is the point. Which is why every check above runs through a public record rather than through us, and why an owner who has pulled the deed, checked the mine mapping and had the structure looked at is in a materially stronger position with us than one who has not.
What We Buy
Fire-damaged residential property across Pittsburgh and Allegheny County, in any condition from smoke to cleared lot. In the city, in the boroughs and townships and out through the valley. Claims open, settled, denied and uninsured. Owner-occupied, tenanted, vacant and inherited.
Where we decline it is geography. Beyond this county the picture changes and we would be the wrong buyer.
To start, send an address through any form here. Before you do, read the three checks on our page about how to tell local cash buyers apart, and work through the timing on our page about how the process actually runs.