Every published answer to this question is a number with no measurement behind it. Seventy percent, eighty five percent, ninety percent: each appears confidently on sites that never say what they counted, over what period, in what market.
We audited fourteen cash buying companies in one California market for the 2026 Index and could not produce this statistic honestly, so we did not publish one. What we can do is more useful than a number anyway, because a single percentage would be wrong for your house regardless of where it came from. Offers are built from four costs and one margin, and once you can see those five terms you can price your own trade and check any offer against it.
This page shows the arithmetic, names which inputs are measurable and which are not, and reports the one part of pricing behaviour we did measure across fourteen companies.
No verified California figure exists, and the numbers in circulation are conventions rather than measurements
Investor pricing conventions like the seventy percent rule are underwriting shortcuts, not observed statistics. When we audited fourteen Sacramento cash buyers in 2026 we found no source, public or commercial, that measured what California cash buyers actually paid against market value. We report that absence rather than filling it.
There is a difference between a pricing convention and a measurement, and the entire category blurs it. A convention is a rule investors use to screen deals. A measurement is what actually happened across a set of real transactions. Almost every percentage you will read in this category is the first thing wearing the clothes of the second.
Measuring it properly is possible but not trivial. It requires the recorded sale price for each purchase, an independent estimate of what the same house would have fetched on the open market in the same condition at the same moment, and a large enough sample that a handful of unusual deals cannot move the result. The hard term is the second one, because a house sold as is to a cash buyer was never listed, so its market price is a counterfactual rather than an observation. The audit method behind the parts we do measure is documented step by step on the Index methodology page.
That is why we published the Sacramento chapter without this statistic and said so in plain language on the page. Verified deed and title activity is planned for a future update of the Index, and a defensible price to value figure is the kind of thing that lane could eventually support. Until it does, we would rather report the gap than fill it.
The practical implication for you is not that the question is unanswerable. It is that the answer is specific to your house, and you can compute it yourself in an afternoon using the method at the end of this page.
“A convention tells you how an investor screens a deal. A measurement tells you what happened. Almost every percentage in this category is the first pretending to be the second.”
An investor offer decomposes into five terms you can price yourself
An investor offer equals after repair value minus repair cost, minus holding cost, minus transaction cost, minus required margin. Four of those five terms are estimable from your own property and local rates. Only margin is discretionary, which is why competing offers on the same house reveal how much of the gap is real cost and how much is negotiating room.
Write it as an identity and the mystery goes out of it. Offer equals ARV minus repairs minus holding minus transaction costs minus margin.
ARV, or after repair value, is what the house is worth once it is in normal sale condition for its neighbourhood. This is not what your house is worth today if it needs work; it is the ceiling the buyer is working back from. You can approximate it from recent sales of comparable homes that were in good condition.
Repairs is the buyer's cost to get from current condition to that ARV, priced at contractor rates rather than at the do it yourself rates a homeowner might assume. This is the term where estimates diverge most, and it is the one worth challenging in writing: ask any buyer to show the repair number they used.
Holding is what the buyer pays to own the house while the work happens and until it resells: financing cost, property taxes, insurance, utilities, security. It scales with how long the project takes, which is why buyers price a house needing structural work differently from one needing paint even when the repair budgets are similar.
Transaction costs are the buyer's costs to acquire and then resell: escrow, title, recording, and on the resale side the commission they will pay. Note that a cash buyer typically pays a commission on the way out even though you did not pay one on the way in. That cost sits inside your offer whether or not anyone mentions it.
Margin is the buyer's required profit for taking the risk. It is the only discretionary term, and it is the reason competing offers on an identical house can differ by tens of thousands. The four cost terms are roughly the same for every buyer in your market. The spread between offers is mostly margin, and margin is the part that responds to competition.
- ARV: what the house sells for once it is in normal condition
- Repairs: contractor cost to get it there, not homeowner cost
- Holding: financing, taxes, insurance, utilities, security, for the length of the project
- Transaction: escrow, title and recording on both ends, plus the resale commission
- Margin: the only discretionary term, and the one competition moves
The seventy percent rule is a screening shortcut, and it produces different answers on identical houses
The seventy percent rule sets a maximum offer at seventy percent of after repair value minus repair cost. It is a screening heuristic that bundles holding, transaction cost and margin into one number. Because repairs are subtracted separately, the same rule yields very different percentages of current value depending on how much work a house needs.
The most widely cited investor convention sets a maximum offer at seventy percent of after repair value, minus the repair budget. It exists because it is fast, not because it is accurate. The thirty percent is a bundle: it absorbs holding cost, both sets of transaction costs, and the buyer's margin, without separating them.
The important property of this rule is that it is anchored to after repair value, not to what your house is worth today. Two houses with the same current market value produce very different offers under the same rule if one needs forty thousand in work and the other needs five thousand, because the repair term is subtracted on top of the thirty percent haircut.
That is also why quoting the rule as a percentage of market value is a category error. It is a percentage of a different quantity, and converting between the two requires knowing the repair budget, which is exactly the number the seller usually cannot see.
Use it the way investors use it: as a sanity check, not as a price. If an offer is far below what the identity in the previous section produces using honest local numbers, the gap is margin, and margin is negotiable or beatable by a competing offer.
iBuyers price closer to market and take the difference as a fee
Large iBuyers describe offers near market value with a service fee deducted, rather than a discounted purchase price. The economics are similar, but the presentation differs: the reduction appears as a line item rather than inside the price. Read the fee schedule and any repair deduction, because both land on your net proceeds.
The national iBuyers operate a different model from a local investor. They generally buy houses that need little work, price them with an automated valuation close to market, and take their compensation as an explicit service fee plus any repair deductions identified during their assessment.
For a seller the arithmetic is the same in the end, because your net proceeds are the price minus everything deducted from it. The difference is transparency of form: a local investor's costs are inside the price, and an iBuyer's are itemised beside it. Itemised is easier to check, which is a genuine advantage, provided you actually check.
The trade off is speed and eligibility. On the two national platforms we audited for the 2026 Index, the published closing windows were materially longer than the local operators' claims: one publishes a floor of twenty one days with a range extending past sixty, against a median claimed fastest close of seven days across the thirteen companies in that set that publish a number.
One more thing to check on any itemised offer: whether the fee schedule on the page is the fee schedule in the contract. On the pages we captured in 2026, fees were described comparatively without a numeric rate, which means the number arrives later in the process, after you have invested time.
Wholesalers and novation operators add a layer that does not appear in the number
A wholesaler contracts to buy and then assigns that contract to an end buyer for a fee. A novation operator repairs and resells the property under an agreement with you. In both cases the price you sign is not necessarily what the property ultimately trades for, and the difference is the operator's compensation.
Not everyone offering to buy your house intends to own it. A wholesaler signs a purchase contract and then sells their position in it to an actual buyer, keeping the difference. This is lawful in California as the law currently stands, and it is covered in detail on our licensing page.
What it means for your price is direct. The wholesaler's fee sits between what you accept and what the end buyer pays, and it is compensation for finding you rather than for taking any risk on the property. If you are comparing offers, an assignable contract from an operator who does not intend to close is not the same product as a firm offer from a buyer who does, even at the same number.
Novation is the newer variant. Rather than buying at a discount, the operator agrees to renovate and resell your property, with you still on title until the eventual sale, and takes their compensation from the improved sale price. The headline number can look far better than a cash offer. The exposure is different too, because you remain the owner while someone else controls the work and the timeline.
Neither model is inherently a problem, and both are legal. The problem is comparing them as though they were the same instrument. Ask any buyer two questions: will you be on title at closing, and are you assigning this contract. The answers tell you which product you are actually being offered.
What the 2026 Index did measure: the speed claims, which are checkable
Across 14 audited Sacramento companies, 13 publish a numeric fastest close claim and the median is 7 days. The fastest is 5 days. The two national operators' own floors are about three times that, at 21 days and roughly three weeks, which is the honest structural difference between local and institutional buyers.
Price was not measurable from public records. Claims were, because a company's own published statements can be captured with a date attached and compared against each other and against the record.
Thirteen of the fourteen companies publish a numeric fastest close claim. The median claim is seven days and the fastest is five. The two national operators publish floors around three weeks, which is not a failure on their part; it reflects a genuinely different process with more steps in it.
Seven days is achievable when title is clean, because the irreducible work in a cash purchase is escrow, a title search and county recording. It is not achievable when there is probate, a lien, or a tenant, regardless of who is buying. A buyer who commits to a specific number of days before seeing the title report has promised something they do not yet know.
We also found closing time claims that conflicted with each other on the same site, including on our own site as captured, which took the resulting deduction like everyone else. Internal consistency is the cheapest signal available to a seller: if a company's own pages disagree about how fast it closes, that is checkable in five minutes and it tells you something about how carefully the rest of the process is run.
How to measure your own discount in one afternoon
Get three competing cash offers and one agent net sheet, then compare net proceeds rather than headline prices. The spread between the cash offers is mostly margin, and the gap to the agent's net figure, after costs and holding time, is the actual price of speed and certainty for your specific house.
The number you want is not an industry average. It is your own, and it takes an afternoon of calls to produce.
Ask three cash buyers for written offers on the same day, on the same information, with no obligation. Ask each one for the after repair value and the repair budget they used. Some will decline, which is itself informative. The spread across three offers on an identical house is the clearest read you will get on how much of the discount is real cost and how much is margin.
Then ask an agent for a net sheet rather than a listing price. A listing price is a headline; a net sheet is what lands in your account after commission, concessions, closing costs and the repairs a financeable sale would require. Ask for a realistic days on market figure for your condition, not for the market average, because carrying costs run for that whole period.
Now compare the two nets. The difference between the best cash net and the agent net, divided by the agent net, is your actual discount. Then set the holding cost of the listing timeline against it and decide whether the remaining gap is worth the certainty. That comparison is worked in full, with the breakeven arithmetic, on our cash offer versus listing page.
One caution on gross versus net. A cash offer with no commission and no concessions is not equivalent to a listing price minus nothing. Compare like with like or the arithmetic will mislead you in whichever direction you were already leaning.
- Three written cash offers, same day, same information
- Ask each buyer for the after repair value and the repair budget behind their number
- One agent net sheet, not a listing price, with a realistic days on market for your condition
- Compare net to net, then price the waiting time
What we plan to measure next
Verified deed and title activity is planned for a future Index update. That lane is the credible route to a measured California price to value figure, because recorded sale prices are public. Until that work is done and checkable, this page will keep teaching the arithmetic instead of publishing a number.
The 2026 Index scores five axes and deliberately excludes deed and title verification from version one. That work is planned for a future update, and it is the same lane that could eventually support a measured price to value statistic, because recorded sale prices are a matter of public record.
Doing it credibly means solving the counterfactual problem: what the same house would have sold for on the open market, in the same condition, at the same time. We would rather take longer and publish a defensible method than publish a fast number nobody can check.
When it lands it will arrive the same way everything else in the Index does, with the math published, the dataset downloadable, and our own company scored by the identical criteria.