Anyone can put "we buy houses" on a website. Almost nothing about that claim is checkable from the website itself, which is the problem this Index exists to solve. Across fifteen California markets we looked up every company we could find that markets cash home purchases, pulled its real estate license record, its corporate filing with the state, its Better Business Bureau file and its review history, captured what each company says about itself on its own pages, and scored all of it on one published rubric that never changes between cities.
That produced 201 scored company profiles covering 135 distinct businesses, each with a dated record of what we could confirm and, just as importantly, what we could not. The chapters below hold the detail city by city. This page holds what only becomes visible when you put all fifteen side by side.
What we found across California
These four figures come from all 201 scored companies together, not from any one city. They are the numbers that only exist because the same rubric was applied fifteen times, and every one of them is reproducible from the combined dataset at the bottom of this page.
133 of 201 scored companies, counted as the rows scoring zero on the licence axis. Buying houses for your own account is legal in California without a real estate license, so this is not a finding of wrongdoing. It changes one specific thing: who you can complain to. A licensed operator answers to the state regulator, and an unlicensed one answers only to a court.
89 of 201. Some returned nothing at all on the state registry. Others returned a company with the right name that nothing inside the filing connected to the people running the business, usually because the only party named was a commercial agent service. The definition matters here, so both numbers are published: 95 rows score zero on the entity axis, and 6 of those 95 DO have a filing we could tie to the operator but score zero anyway because the entity is suspended or forfeited. Subtracting those six gives the 89 counted above.
68 of 201, counted as the rows scoring zero on the review axis. In a category most sellers vet by reading reviews, fully a third of companies offer nothing to read.
35 percent of companies score under 40 and only 12 percent reach 80 or above. The spread is the point: this is not a market where everyone is broadly similar.
No single company dominates California
Eleven different operators lead the fifteen chapters. One leads four of them and one leads two; the other nine lead once each. A company that ranks first in one city routinely places mid-table in the next, because the rubric measures each company against the records and the roster of the market it is actually competing in. There is no statewide winner to recommend, and this Index does not name one.
The same three national brands appear almost everywhere, and score very differently
Two companies appear in eleven or more chapters each, and no other company appears in more than five. Their scores diverge sharply, and the reason is structural rather than local: a national brand can hold an impeccable corporate license and still score zero on reviews in every market, because franchise and iBuyer models rarely maintain a local profile a seller can read. A locally owned operator with a hundred reviews and no license record produces the mirror image of that pattern.
A corporate registration and a real estate license are different things, and they disagree more often than you would expect
One company in this study is currently listed as an active corporation in good standing by the Secretary of State, rated A+ and accredited by the Better Business Bureau, and recorded by the Department of Real Estate as holding a corporation license that expired in 2024 after a designated officer's license was revoked. All three statements were true on the same day. Checking one register tells you what that register knows and nothing more.
Company claims and company records disagree most often about age
The single most common inconsistency in this study is a founding year on a company's own website that its own Better Business Bureau record does not support, sometimes by fifteen years or more. The second most common is a closing-time promise stated more than one way on one page. Neither is evidence of dishonesty; both are things a seller can resolve with one direct question before signing anything.
The register-disagreement finding above comes from our Modesto chapter, where one company is active with the state and expired with the regulator, and the same pattern of a company advertising while its corporation sits suspended first appeared in the Sacramento chapter that established this rubric. If you want the definition of a cash offer before reading any table, start with what counts as a cash offer in California.
The fifteen city chapters
Each chapter is a complete study of one market: every company we could find marketing there, what each public record says about it, and a ranked table with the math shown. 201 scored profiles in total. Start with your city.
Companies are named inside their own chapters, next to the records that produced their score, rather than listed here. A ranking means very little stripped of the evidence behind it, and every company in this study is entitled to be read in context rather than reduced to a name on a summary page.
- San Bernardino18 companies verified
The largest chapter, and the one where we corrected our own reporting: ten companies were recorded as unverifiable against a state outage that turned out to be a defect in our own software.
- Elk Grove17 companies verified
The first suburb studied inside a metro the Index had already covered, where ten of seventeen companies turned out to be Sacramento operators with a local landing page.
- Oakland17 companies verified
Where a licensed local operator with a six-review base outranks better-known names, and where the publisher's own company lost first place to a scoring correction.
- Orange County16 companies verified
The only county-wide chapter, and the one this Index got most wrong on its first pass: four companies we had excluded belonged in the table, and three of them now rank in its top half.
- Chula Vista14 companies verified
A border-market chapter the publisher's own company is excluded from entirely, because its own website makes no claim to serve the city.
- Sacramento14 companies verified
Where the Index began and where the rubric was tuned, including the finding of a suspended corporation still advertising quick closings.
- Stockton13 companies verified
Home to the widest self-contradiction in the study: one company's page states five different fastest-closing figures in five places.
- Visalia13 companies verified · Fast Home Buyer California ranked first
Where one licensed broker quietly operates two competing cash-buyer brands, and where a company's corporation sits suspended by the tax board.
- Modesto12 companies verified
The clearest case of three public registers describing one company three different ways on the same day.
- Riverside12 companies verified
Where two out-of-state operators market Riverside-specific pages while holding no California license, corporation or local review presence at all.
- San Jose12 companies verified
The most expensive market in the study, where a locally headquartered operator with a triple-confirmed license leads the table.
- Roseville12 companies verified
Where we retracted our own reporting: five companies were published as unverifiable against a state registry outage that never happened, and checking them properly moved the chapter's top two places.
- Bakersfield11 companies verified · Fast Home Buyer California ranked first
Where completing six lookups our own tooling had failed on moved one company from sixth place to second.
- Chico10 companies verified · Fast Home Buyer California ranked first
The smallest market studied, and one where a company's own site carried an accreditation claim its Better Business Bureau record did not support.
- Fresno10 companies verified · Fast Home Buyer California ranked first
Where a company's city page redirected to a different city's content entirely, which is how the Index's phantom-market rule was first written.
How every company is scored
Every company is scored out of 100 on five axes: corporate status and longevity worth 25 points, license verification worth 20, the Better Business Bureau record worth 20, claims consistency worth 20, and the review record worth 15. Those weights were set once, on the first chapter, and have not been changed since. They are identical in every city and are not adjusted after seeing anyone's results.
Two rules do most of the work and are worth knowing before you read any table. A corporate filing only scores when something inside the record independently ties it to the operator, which is a demanding test that costs real companies real points. And a license record that exists but is not currently active scores zero, because an expired credential is not a credential. Both rules were written before the scores were seen, and both are applied to the publisher's own company on exactly the same terms.
The complete recomputable math, the identity-linking standards, and every stated limitation:
how we verify DRE licenses, Secretary of State filings, and BBB recordsWhat our four findings mean
When we look up a company's corporate filing, one of four things happens. Three of them score zero, and they are not the same as each other. Keeping them separate is most of what makes this Index useful, because "we found nothing" and "we found something we could not connect to this business" tell a seller very different things.
- Confirmed
- A record exists and something inside it independently ties it to the operator. Most often the person the state lists as agent for service of process is the same person the company names as its principal.
- Candidate only
- A record with a matching name exists, and nothing inside it connects that filing to the business marketing to you. Usually the only party named is a commercial agent service. It scores zero, and the label is the only thing that tells you why.
- Not found
- We searched a working public registry and it returned nothing. That is a captured result, not a gap in our work. Where a brand name is generic we run two separate searches and keep the full non-matching results so the absence can be audited.
- Not identified
- A structural absence rather than a missing record. A franchise location or a sole proprietor trading under a fictitious name often has no separate filing to find, because none is required.
Who publishes this, and the conflict
This Index is published by Sell My House Fast in CA, and the same people operate Fast Home Buyer California, which is a cash home buyer and therefore appears in the table of most chapters. That is a real conflict of interest and the only honest way to handle it is to publish it, score the company by identical criteria, and show the working.
Here is what that has actually produced. Fast Home Buyer California appears in 14 of the 15 chapters and leads 4 of them. It is excluded outright from one chapter, because its own website does not claim to serve those markets, and the Index's own phantom-market rule applies to it the same way it applies to everyone else. In August 2026 we found that its claims axis had been scored inconsistently across chapters in its own favour, corrected every chapter to the strictest reading, and published the result: the company lost first place in one chapter and a rank in another. Each affected chapter says so in its own profile of the company.
The complete data for every company, including ours, is downloadable below. If our math is wrong, it is wrong in public where you can check it.
The clearest single example is in the Oakland chapter, where correcting our own scoring cost our company first place. The company itself is Fast Home Buyer California, a licensed California cash home buyer, and you are welcome to hold it to every standard this Index applies to everyone else.
Common questions
What is the California Cash Home Buyer Index?
It is an independent study of companies that buy houses for cash in California. For every company we could find marketing to a given city, we pull the state real estate license record, the Secretary of State corporate filing, the Better Business Bureau file, the review record, and dated captures of the company's own claims, then score all of it on one published rubric that is the same in every city. The 2026 edition covers 201 scored companies across 15 markets, and the underlying data is free to download.
Do cash home buyers in California need a real estate license?
Not to buy houses for their own account. California's Business and Professions Code sections 10130 to 10131 require a license for acting on behalf of somebody else, not for buying as a principal. Enforcement questions arise mainly around wholesaling, where the operator markets the property rather than their own contract interest. A pending bill, AB 1850, would require a license for wholesaling and mandate written disclosure; as of August 2026 it remains pending and is not law. What a license changes today is recourse: licensed operators answer to the Department of Real Estate, and unlicensed ones do not.
How do I check a cash home buyer myself?
Three free lookups cover most of it, and they take about ten minutes. Search the Department of Real Estate's public license lookup for the company name and then the owner's name, and read the status field rather than just noting that a record exists. Search the Secretary of State's business search for the exact legal entity, and look at who is named as agent for service of process. Search the Better Business Bureau for the profile and check the business start date against what the website claims. All three are linked at the bottom of this page. Ask any buyer for their exact legal entity name in writing first; a company that will not give you that has answered your question.
How much less do cash buyers pay than market value?
We do not publish a statewide percentage, because no measurement we could stand behind exists and inventing one would be worse than saying so. As general industry mechanics, investor buyers commonly work from a formula around 70 percent of a property's after-repair value minus repair costs, while iBuyers describe offers closer to market with fees deducted. You are trading price for speed and certainty. The reliable way to see the size of that trade in your own case is to collect more than one offer, and to check that the offers are actually from different companies.
Why does a company rank first in one city and mid-table in another?
Because the rubric scores a company against the market it is competing in, and rosters differ. A company with a strong license record and a thin review base will beat a market full of unlicensed operators and lose to one that contains a licensed local firm with a hundred reviews. Some axes are also genuinely local: review presence is captured city by city, and a company can have a deep review record in one market and none at all in the next. What never changes between cities is the rubric itself.
You buy houses too. Why should I trust this?
You should check it rather than trust it, which is why every figure is downloadable. What we can show you is how the conflict has actually played out. Our company is excluded from two chapters by our own rules, it leads four, and when we found in August 2026 that its claims score had been applied inconsistently in our favour across several chapters, we corrected all of them to the strictest reading and it cost us first place in one city. Every one of those decisions is written up on the chapter page where it happened.
Download the data
Every company in every chapter, in one file: 201 rows covering 135 distinct businesses across 15 markets, with the license, corporate, BBB, review and claims fields behind each score, and a written finding on every corporate lookup explaining which of the four labels applies and why. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license, free for any use with attribution. The dataset carries no home addresses or personal contact details gathered during verification. Captures were taken in ; the next refresh comes with the 2027 cycle.
Download all 15 chapters (CSV)License: CC BY 4.0. Primary sources: California DRE public license lookup, California Secretary of State business search, Better Business Bureau, and the AB 1850 bill status at leginfo.legislature.ca.gov.