How We Make Money, and How We Calculate the Numbers

Why this site exists

Most of the guidance written for home sellers is published by companies that only earn money when the seller has equity. Brokerages earn a percentage of a sale price. Lenders earn on a refinance. When the seller has equity, those interests line up reasonably well with the seller's interests.

When the seller has little or no equity, they stop lining up. The standard advice, list it and wait for the right offer, assumes there is a cushion to pay for the commission, the closing costs, the concessions and the carrying cost of waiting. A seller who is at or under water does not have that cushion, so the advice quietly does not apply. It is rarely rewritten for them. It is just repeated.

This site covers the options a seller in that position actually has, including the unglamorous ones and the ones where the honest answer is that every path costs something.

How we make money

The site is free to use. There is no subscription, no paywall, no fee to run the calculator, and no fee to read anything here.

We do not charge homeowners any fee, and we never ask a homeowner for money up front. If anyone contacts you claiming to represent this site and asks for an advance fee of any kind, that is not us.

Continuity Home Partners buys houses. That is the business, and it is how this site is funded. If you contact us, we may make you an offer, and we make money if you sell to us. We are not an agent, a nonprofit, a counseling service, or a government program, and we are not affiliated with one.

That is a real conflict of interest, and we would rather name it than bury it in a footer. Here is how we handle it. The arithmetic on this site is the same arithmetic we run before we buy anything, so it shows you the cases where selling to a buyer like us is the wrong move. The calculator tells you when listing with an agent nets you more. It tells you when a discounted cash offer, including one from us, would leave you owing money at closing. We would rather you learn that here than after you have signed something.

We are not paid by anyone else. We do not sell reader information, we do not take referral fees, and we do not run ads on this site. If you never contact us, this site costs you nothing and we earn nothing from you.

This site is published by Continuity Home Partners. If our funding model changes, this page changes first, and the change is noted here rather than made quietly.

What we will not do

• We do not sell reader contact details to buyer lists. Your information is not a product here, and it does not get resold into a marketing pipeline.
• We do not accept payment to rank one option above another. No option on this site is placed higher, described more favorably, or given more space because someone paid for that placement.
• We do not present a recommendation as neutral if we would be paid for it. Where we would be paid, we disclose it on that page, next to the recommendation itself, not only here.
• We do not write around a bad outcome. If an option is usually the wrong one for a seller with no equity, we say so, including when it is one we could be paid on.

How we calculate the numbers

Every figure produced by the calculator and the comparison tables comes from the assumption set below. We publish it so you can check our math or replace any input with a real quote you have in hand.

• Agent commission: 5.5% of sale price, total. This is used as a midpoint of a negotiable range of roughly 4% to 6%. Commission is negotiable, and who pays which side is itself negotiable.
• Seller closing costs: 2% of sale price. This covers the usual seller-side line items outside of commission. It varies meaningfully by state and by local custom.
• Concessions and repair credits: 0.5% to 3.5% of sale price, scaled by the condition of the property. A well-maintained house sits near the bottom of that range. A house with deferred maintenance or inspection findings sits near the top.
• Investor cash offers: 62% to 78% of value, scaled by condition. A house needing significant work lands near the low end. A house needing little work lands near the high end. We also model 0.5% of value in seller-side closing costs on a cash sale, on the basis that most cash buyers cover the rest.
• Instant offers: 90% of value, less a 5% service fee and 1.5% closing costs. This models the general structure of instant buyer programs rather than any single company's current terms. We also model these programs as declining houses that need major work, so no instant offer is shown for that condition.

These are national midpoints, and your local market can move any of them. Commission norms, transfer taxes, who pays title insurance, and what buyers expect in concessions all differ by state and sometimes by county. Treat every output here as a starting estimate to be replaced by real quotes, not as a prediction of your closing statement. If you have a signed offer, a settlement statement, or a written quote that contradicts one of these assumptions, we want to see it.

Where our figures come from

We are describing the types of sources we rely on rather than implying more precision than we have. In general terms, the numbers and explanations on this site are built from:

• Lender and servicer disclosures, including the loan and payoff documents sellers receive, which govern what is owed and what a lender will permit.
• Publicly available closing cost data, used to set the ranges for seller-side costs and to sanity check how much those costs vary by region.
• HUD and consumer protection guidance, which informs how we describe housing counseling and the protections available to homeowners.
• The published terms and generally reported structure of cash buyer and instant buyer programs, which is how we set the cash offer and instant offer ranges.

Where a specific rule or program is decisive for your situation, we would rather send you to the primary source or to a licensed professional than paraphrase it here and be slightly wrong.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us. Send the page and the specific figure or statement you are disputing, and, if you have one, the document or source that shows the correct version. Write to desk@sellmyhousenoequity.com.

When a correction holds up, we update the page and note that it changed. We do not edit a number out from under readers and pretend it was always that way.

This is not advice

Everything on this site is general information. It is not legal advice, tax advice, or financial advice, and reading it does not create any professional relationship between you and Continuity Home Partners.

Every situation differs. The loan you have, the state you are in, your equity position, and the timeline you are working against all change what the right move is. Before you sign anything, talk to a licensed attorney, a HUD-approved housing counselor, or a tax professional licensed in your state.

If you are behind on payments, HUD-approved housing counseling is free. Being asked to pay for that specific help is a signal worth paying attention to.