How Fast Can You Sell a House in Ohio?
The Time it Takes to Sell Your Home Depends on the Path You Choose
TABLE OF CONTENTS
(1) Three Paths and Three Different Speeds to an Ohio Home Sale
(2) How Long Does it Take to Sell an Ohio Home with a Realtor?
(a) “Days on Market” Affects How Fast You Sell Your Ohio Home
(b) How Quickly Will You be Paid for Your Ohio Home When Using a Realtor?
(c) The “Escrow Period” Affects Length of Time to Sell Ohio Home
(3) How Long Does it Take to Sell an Ohio Home Using a Wholesaler?
(a) After the Wholesaler Sells My Contract, How Long Will it Take to Close?
(4) How Long Does it Take to Sell an Ohio Home to a Cash Buyer?
(a) How Fast Do We Buy Ohio Homes?
(b) Why is Selling an Ohio Home to a Cash Buyer so Much Faster?
(c) Buyers Using Loans Instead of Cash Will Slow Down Ohio Home Sale
(d) How Does Selling Your Ohio House with a Realtor Slow Down the Sale?
(5) Dramatically Faster to Sell an Ohio Home to a Cash Buyer
(6) What are the Slowest and Fastest Months to Sell a House in Ohio?
Three Paths and Three Different Speeds to an Ohio Home Sale
There are multiple routes you can take to sell your Ohio home. The path you choose will affect how much time it takes to sell.
(1) You can find a realtor and let them list your Ohio home for sale on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) (i.e. the open market), typically paying a 5-6% commission (a percentage of the sale price) in exchange for the realtor’s services. Note that you should never agree to 6% even if that is what a realtor tells you they charge. Always ask for a 5% commission.
(2) You can sell your Ohio home using a wholesaler, which we have written an article about here. In short, this is where a person or company signs a home purchase contract with you and then tries to find a buyer who they can sell the contract to for a fee. The wholesaler acts as a middleman who takes a cut of your potential profit. They have control of the sale process while they look for a buyer.
This sounds similar to using a realtor, but wholesalers are not licensed and regulated like realtors, and realtors do not enter into a purchase contract with you and then try to sell that contract to someone else. Realtors enter into a contract with you called a, “listing agreement,” which is very different.
(3) Finally, you can sell your Ohio home directly to a cash buyer. This is a way to (i) avoid paying realtor commissions, (ii) save on closing costs, and (iii) have the added benefit of being able to meet face-to-face with, directly communicate with and get to know the person who is offering to buy your home.
This route is very different from indirectly communicating with multiple potential buyers through a realtor, or relying on a wholesaler to find a buyer.
Each of the sale options outlined above have characteristics that will affect how fast you can sell your Ohio home. Let’s look at each option in detail:
How Long Does it Take to Sell an Ohio Home Listed with a Realtor?
The exact amount of time it will take to sell your Ohio home will vary depending upon which Ohio city your home is located in (some cities are hotter markets than others), but based on current data at the time of this article, we can generally answer that your Ohio home will sell and you will be paid between 50-60 days after you list your home with a realtor. Let’s look at the details behind this timeframe:
“Days on Market” Affects How Fast You Sell Your Ohio Home
Out of the three options discussed above for selling your Ohio home, the most widely tracked data is available with respect to selling your home with a realtor. That is because part of the sale process with realtors, where they list your home publicly and it sits on the market while potential buyers and buyers’ agents come to tour it, inspect it and make offers (this is called, “days on market”), is tracked by many different large data providers.
Redfin, for example, which tracks “days on market” data closely, reported that in November of 2023 the median number of days that a home was listed on the market in Ohio before entering into contract with a buyer was 30 days. This data is broken down even further by County.
For example, in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Redfin reported that the median days on market for a home was 27 days for the period of 11.27.23 – 12.24.23. In Summit County, Ohio, the median days on market for the same dates was 25.3 days. In Portage County, Ohio it was 24.10 days, in Geauga County, Ohio it was 38.5 days, in Medina County, Ohio it was 12.3 days and in Lake County, Ohio it was 32 days. This data breaks down even further by specific city.
As you can see, “days on market” can vary quite a bit depending on exactly where your Ohio home is located. It will also vary depending on the time of year.
How Quickly Will You be Paid for Your Ohio Home When Using a Realtor?
It is important to not confuse “days on market” with how long it will take you to actually receive the money from the buyer for your Ohio home. These two things (days on market vs. receiving payment) are very different.
Days on market refers to how long your property is listed on the open market before it goes under contract. So, with the data above in mind, if you had listed your home with a realtor in Portage County, OH in December of 2023, for example, you could have expected to enter into contract with a buyer within about 24 days of listing your home.
That was true as long as your realtor did not advise you to list the home for too high or too low of a price, in which case it might have taken longer or shorter periods of time, respectively, to enter into contract with a buyer.
The “Escrow Period,” a period of time which begins after “days on market” determines how much longer it will be before you are actually paid for your property.
The “Escrow Period” Affects Length of Time to Sell Ohio Home
Once you enter into contract, you will then start the clock on what is referred to as the, “escrow” and/or the, “due diligence period,” where the buyer who has signed a contract with you is given an opportunity to hire different types of professionals to inspect your home. The buyer may then ask for repairs and/or discounts to their initial offer based on what comes back in the inspector’s report.
At the same time as the inspections are taking place, a title company will begin doing research to investigate the title to your Ohio home to make sure it is clean and can be transferred to the buyer.
There may be extensions to the escrow period if the buyer, realtor or title company find items of concern about the home when doing their research and inspections.
Once the inspection/title review period ends, if the buyer has decided to move forward, they will then “close” on your Ohio home. At the closing, the title company transfers the purchase price to the seller (typically by wire or check) and transfers the title to the buyer.
This time period of buyer inspections, title research and ultimately transferring title to the buyer and money to the seller (the, “escrow”) typically takes around 25-30 days.
Therefore, in our example of Cuyahoga County, OH in December of 2023, when you combine the “days on market” with the “escrow period,” you could have expected a total of between 52-57 days before receiving payment for your home.
How Long Does it Take to Sell Ohio Home Using a Wholesaler?
Unlike the “days on market” data available for homes listed with realtors, there are not good sources of data detailing the amount of time it will take you to sell your home and receive your money when working with a wholesaler. There are two primary reasons for this:
(1) When a wholesaler signs a purchase contract with you and then tries to find someone who will buy that contract from them, they do not list the sale publicly like realtors.
A realtor will list the house, the price and basic purchase terms online at well-known websites like Zillow.com, Realtor.com and Redfin.com. A realtor will also post the property to the MLS where every other realtor can see the property. In contrast, wholesalers use all sorts of less public methods to try to “flip” the purchase agreement, such as reaching out to email-lists of buyers they have collected over time, text message marketing campaigns, and listing the properties on their private websites; and
(2) While there is some standardization and regulation of the education, practice and licensing of realtors, there is no standardization or regulation of wholesalers.
Beginners in real estate investing often turn to wholesaling as a way to learn about real estate and get started. As there are no minimum education requirements for wholesalers like there are for realtors, and as there are no experienced brokers backing up wholesalers with numerous resources like there are for realtors, it is very difficult to know if the wholesaler you are dealing with is educated, capable and reliable.
You could be dealing with a wholesaler who does not have a basic understanding of real estate transactions or contracts, and is doing one of their very first deals. That could lead to mistakes, delays and added risk. On the other hand, you could be dealing with a very experienced wholesaler who has a buyer they know will want the property (which could lead to a very quick sale).
In other words, neither the process the wholesaler uses to buy homes, nor the specific wholesaler, will be particularly predictable or standardized.
For the above reasons, it is incredibly difficult to predict how long it will take to sell your home with a wholesaler. If you find a really good one, you might expect them to flip your contract to an end-buyer within 25-30 days (which is not the end of the sale – see the next paragraph). If you find a bad one, they might not succeed in flipping the contract at all and leave you back at square one.
After the Wholesaler Sells My Contract, How Long Will it Take to Close
Once the purchase contract has been sold/flipped to a person or company that will actually buy your home, the next question is: How long will that end-buyer take to actually close?
The answer is that this is entirely dependent upon how the wholesaler has structured their contract, and you cannot assume that any two wholesaler contracts will be the same. This is another element of unpredictability in working with a wholesaler, and it is a question you definitely want to not only ask any wholesaler you might work with, but also something you want to see for yourself written in plain English in any contract you sign with a wholesaler.
See the last section of our article here for three important tips when working with wholesalers.
How Long Does it Take to Sell Ohio Home to a Cash Buyer?
While we cannot speak for other cash buyers, as we have personally been in the business of purchasing Ohio properties off-market quickly for cash for many years, we are able to look back across all our transactions and confirm exactly how long it takes us on average to deliver payment to a seller (as detailed in the next section).
If you want to assure yourself that you are dealing with a professional cash buyer who will make good on their promise to close quickly, start with some basic questions. Make sure they can tell you without hesitation:
(i) How fast they will make an offer to you after touring your property;
(ii) What their home buying process looks like (hint: it should sound straightforward and simple);
(iii) Which specific title company they use to close the transaction (they should be able to give you the name and location promptly without needing to look anything up);
(iv) How long their title company typically takes to complete title research;
(v) When and where their last purchase was and how long it took to close; and
(vi) What their average closing speed is on their transactions.
If they can give you the above basic information with ease, then you at least have the foundation of professionalism and may be dealing with an experienced cash buyer who can close reasonably quickly.
So How Fast Will We Buy Your Ohio Home?
Over our many years of buying properties for cash, we have paid sellers for their Ohio homes in as little as 11 days and in as long as 26 days. On average, sellers will receive payment for their property from us in 17 days from the date our offer is accepted.
This is significantly faster than the 52-57 days it would have taken to receive payment for a property listed with a realtor in Cuyahoga County, OH in our example above.
Why is Selling an Ohio Home to a Cash Buyer so Much Faster?
There are some significant differences between the process of working with a cash buyer like us and listing your home with a realtor. These differences relate directly to the efficiency of the process and how quickly you will receive payment.
Our process as cash buyers is very simple. First, we have a conversation over the phone with the seller about the home. If we are interested in the property, we meet the seller for a tour. If we are interested after the tour, we make an offer within 24-48 hours.
If our offer is accepted, we immediately start the escrow period and tell our title company we want to close as soon as they are able to complete the title research. There is no lengthy inspection period, no third parties, lenders or banks conducting their own due diligence and imposing outside requirements and there is absolutely no gamesmanship. It is just my business partner (who I happen to be married to) and I who make quick decisions and line up a straight shot to the closing table.
Buyers Using Loans Instead of Cash Will Slow Down Ohio Home Sale
In contrast to our speedy all-cash purchase process, when a buyer is using a bank/lender and getting a mortgage to purchase your Ohio home, the lender imposes numerous additional hoops that both the buyer and the title company must jump through to complete the sale (e.g. the lender requires an appraisal of the home’s value by an appraisal company, may require investigation of specific problems with the home, requires special conditions for the title insurance prepared by the title company, etc.).
Sometimes these hoops are so difficult that the buyer is forced to cancel the sale (e.g. problems with the condition of the home when the buyer is using an FHA loan). In other circumstances, the lender’s processes simply add a lot of time to the closing process.
As we are using cash that is already available to us at the time we make the offer, we do not need to prove to a bank that the home is worth as much as we are offering, nor do we need some third-party to decide that the home is in sufficient condition to be worthy of a bank’s loan.
Similarly, our title company already knows what elements we want as part of our title insurance policy so we do not need to have any extensive back and forth with them during the closing process. We decide all of these items on our own and do not need any third-party approvals.
Accordingly, as cash buyers we have a much faster closing process. We dodge many of the bumps in the road and pitfalls that you might run into when a home is listed with a realtor and where many potential buyers are relying on bank financing.
How Does Selling Your Ohio House with a Realtor Slow Down the Sale?
In contrast to our fast cash buying process for Ohio property outlined above, there are many more steps and parties involved when working with a realtor.
The process when selling your home with a realtor will look like this:
(1) Interview realtors and find one that you trust enough to hire;
(2) Negotiate and sign a listing agreement which gives the realtor the exclusive right to list your home in the public market for a specified period of time (typically they will ask for exclusive rights to list for 3-6 months);
(3) Realtor hires a photographer and, in some circumstances, a staging company to prepare the home and marketing photos for the public listing;
(4) Realtor adds the property to the MLS and syndicates the listing out to many of the recognized public listing websites (Zillow, Redfin, Realtor.com, and so on);
(5) Realtor waits for calls about the property and/or agents for buyers will schedule showings with a showing service used by the realtor;
(6) Multiple buyers go see the home and their agents will call the listing realtor for more information;
(7) At some point, but without any pre-confirmed time-period and assuming buyers who toured the home are interested in it, they will submit offers. These offers will vary in multiple aspects such as (i) how much time the buyer wants to conduct professional inspections, (ii) the types of inspections that will be performed (general, pest (termite, carpenter ant, etc.), sewer line, lead, radon, etc.), (iii) how long the entire escrow process will be, (iv) the purchase price, (v) whether or not the seller will be asked to make repairs or provide credits for repairs, and (vi) the closing date, to name a few;
(8) The realtors will present received offers to the seller. If no offers are received then, at some point, the list price may be adjusted and the process described in item #6 above will be repeated. This process of adjusting price, having buyers tour the property and reviewing offers will be repeated until the seller accepts an offer;
(9) Once the seller accepts an offer, the escrow period will begin. In many cases the buyer will hire third-party professional inspectors to conduct inspections and will decide, after reviewing the inspection reports, whether to back out of the deal, ask for discounts or repairs, or to proceed with the purchase;
(10) Many of these buyers will be using lenders, and during the escrow period the lender(s) will have the property appraised by a third-party appraisal company. The appraisal is done so the bank can confirm that the home is worth as much as the buyer is offering. Banks do not want to make a loan that is larger than a certain percentage of the value of the home, so if the appraisal comes back too low relative to the buyer’s offered price, the bank may decline the loan application and the buyer will need to back out (or, you, as the seller will be asked to adjust your price for the buyer). If the appraisal is acceptable to the lender, the sale can move forward;
(11) The title company will research title and will be required to provide title insurance to the buyer and the lender. The lender will frequently have some back and forth with the title company to ask for changes/updates to some aspects of the title company’s initially proposed title insurance coverage.
(12) With (i) agreements in place between you and the buyer about any repairs or credits for repairs, (ii) a lender-approved appraisal and title insurance policy, and (iii) the lender having deposited the lion’s share of the purchase price into an escrow account, the sale will finally be permitted to close.
Dramatically Faster to Sell Ohio Home to a Cash Buyer
As you can see from the above, there are many more steps and parties involved when using a realtor to sell your home. This absolutely does not mean using a realtor is a bad idea. In some circumstances, particularly when the home is in great condition and the seller has no specific need for speed, it can make a lot of sense.
However if (i) your home is in rougher shape such that it may not appraise well, (ii) lenders may have concerns about the condition, (iii) it will not appeal to the large portion of buyers who want a home they can move right in to without needing to make lots of repairs, and (iv) speed of the sale is important to you, it makes sense to explore the option of working with a cash buyer.
What are the Slowest and Fastest Months to Sell a House in Ohio?
How fast you can sell your Ohio home is not only a function of whether you sell to a cash buyer, realtor or wholesaler. The time of year that you try to sell also has an impact. This is often referred to as the “seasonality” of the housing market.
Seasonality in the housing market simply refers to the fact that when economists look at the data over the course of any given calendar year, they consistently find that prices are higher and transactions are more frequent in the summer. In contrast, in the winter everything slows down.
The National Association of Realtors (NAR), an authority when it comes to housing data, has been tracking seasonality trends since 1999. They have found, consistently, that both the number of home sales and the price received by sellers begins to increase in the spring and that trend continues into the summer. The busiest months, according to the NAR, are May, June, July and August, but June stands out as, “the peak month of home selling activity.”
NAR points out that on opposite end, November, December, January and February are the slowest months when it comes to selling activity, with January being the slowest.
Seasonality in the Housing Market: Graph From HousingWire.com
This chart from Housingwire.com gives you a general sense of how the trend works out on a monthly basis.
As you can see from the chart, there is far mor activity between May and August than at any time during the rest of the year. With this in mind, you can be strategic about when you try to sell your home to take advantage of seasonality trends.
One benefit to working with a cash buyer is that we are not seasonally dependent in any way. In other, because this is our full time business, rain or shine, winter or summer, we have the same demand every day of the year. For those who may find themselves heading into the winter months and needing to sell quickly, it may therefore be worth reaching out to cash buyers to see what they can offer.
How Can You Sell Your House Faster in Ohio?
Now that you know how to take advantage of seasonality, and how selling your Ohio home using a realtor, wholesaler or cash buyer can affect the speed of the sale, it is worth considering other tactics you can deploy to increase the success and speed of the sale.
One thing to consider is making minor improvements to your home. I know that suggestion may initially cause you to scoff. I mean, it is obvious that if the house is in better condition it will be more attractive to buyers and may sell faster, but improvements require money, time, stress, contractors, etc.
However, consider the fact that even easy, cheap, DIY changes can cause potential buyers to have more interest and pursue your Ohio home more quickly. We detailed some options in our article linked to here.
To give another example, we have purchased many smelly homes over the years, as we discuss in our article linked here. If pet and other odors may be reducing interest in your home from potential buyers, we have several suggestions in that article that are easily deployed without much effort.
Generally speaking, consider that an experienced buyer is going to be tallying up everything they will need to do to your home once they buy it.
If you can knock even a couple of items off of their list, be it paint, doorknobs, bad odors, bad carpet (it is so easy to tear out old carpet if it has not been glued down), small holes in walls, etc., the home may be more attractive and may sell more quickly and for a better price.
Can You Sell Your Ohio House Fast Online?
We have become accustomed to being able to do so much online that it is only natural to wonder if you can quickly sell your Ohio home online, without any in-person interactions.
For a time, the big names in the business like Zillow and Open Door tried to make such transactions possible. They failed miserably, losing billions of dollars. There are a couple of articles about their failures here and here.
While these “iBuyers” have not completely thrown in the towel, they learned that relying entirely on computers to buy and sell real estate is fraught with pitfalls.
The reality is that any knowledgeable and experienced buyer who has been in the business of buying homes for a while knows that they need to walk through the property they may purchase, talk to the seller, and establish a relationship and foundation of trust before closing the deal.
There may still be some companies out there who will enable you to deal with a computer more than a person in selling your home. Considering what has happened to the companies who tried to do that in the past, it is worth approaching those options with some caution.
At a bare minimum, make sure you speak face-to-face with someone who says they have the ability to buy your home. Ask them lots of questions. Assess their experience and knowledge.
Without that real interaction, it will be very difficult to know what you are getting yourself into, and you may be in for a bumpy, unpleasant ride.
You Can Sell Your Ohio Home Quickly for a Good Price
Hopefully the above information has provided a better understanding of how fast you can sell your Ohio property, whether it is in Cuyahoga County, Summit County, Portage County, Geauga County or anywhere else in the Greater Cleveland market.
If you have questions or want further information about the cash buying process, feel free to contact us.
