Growing real estate trend trades off money for convenience

Jared Case and his fiancé needed cash quick to make improvements to their new home.

Case said he was “pleasantly surprised” by how easy it was.

Yvonne Mendenhall went a more traditional route, using a realtor.

“We got more than our asking price,” she said. “We got it in four days.”’

Both were thrilled with their results, but the process was drastically different.

Selling home for cash comes with risks, local agent says

Mendenhall repainted the inside of her home, and her realtor brought in a stager.

She estimated they spent less than $10,000 getting the house ready.

“We just absolutely could not have figured it out on our own,” she said.

Case logged onto Zillow and answered some questions about his home.

Within days, an inspector came and made a final offer, which Case accepted.

A month later, he had cash in the bank, which he used to make immediate renovations to his new home.

“The fact that they had given me dates and dollar amounts and everything stayed on those dates and dollar amounts — down to the closing and it was all done just like they said it would be — it was a really nice surprise,” Case said.

“It sounded a little bit too good to be true, but at the end of the day I think they’re just really well organized,” Case said.

Quentin Dane, a works as a Zillow partner agent in the Triangle, acting as a middleman between the company, buyers and sellers.

Selling home for cash comes with risks, local agent says

He represents Zillow, though, not the consumers.

He said demand is strong and growing.

“We’ve just turned into this big crazy on-demand world that requires instant push button make magic, and the traditional way of selling real estate it is not that,” Dane said.

Since launching its iBuyer business a little more than a year ago, Zillow said it’s received requests from more than 100,000 home sellers.

“It’s certainly not a flash in the pan,” Dane said. "This is without a doubt a new way – it is the new way – of selling your house”

Most iBuyers charge a service fee instead of commission.

And while Zillow gives homeowners a side-by-side comparison, part of the attraction is in the no-hassle deal: no adding upgrades, no replacing carpets or repainting walls.

The offer generally reflects that; it can be thousands of dollars less than offers in the traditional market.

“That’s leaving a lot of money on the table,” said Christine Khoury, a realtor with Coldwell Banker Howard Perry and Walston.

A longtime realtor in Chapel Hill, Khoury said the iBuyer market is giving her traditional real estate game some competition.

But she said she can offer clients something no iBuyer can compete with.

“I guide them to get their house ready for the market so when it goes on the market — right now we have an average days on the market of eight days, and that's for the past 10 years — there’s a lot of features in the weeds that you don't realize until you get into the weeds, and then sometimes it’s just too late,” she said.