We buy houses in Colorado, for cash, as-is, on your date.

For a cash sale, timing matters less than it does for a listing. A listed house depends on buyer demand, mortgage rates and how many similar homes are on the market that month along the Front Range. Our offer starts from the after-repair value, and that value comes from recent sales of similar houses near yours, so current market conditions sit inside our number too. What a cash sale takes out is the waiting: no marketing period, no buyer to find, no loan to approve. If your reason to sell is a date, a condition problem or a life change, the right time is when that reason arrives, not when the market says so.

Rarely, and never in the absolute. A slower market stretches days on market and pushes sellers toward price cuts and concessions, which is what people mean when they call it a bad time to sell. That affects a listing far more than a cash sale, where there’s no waiting for a buyer to appear. If you can wait and the house is easy to hold, waiting can make sense. If holding it costs you money or sleep every month, get both numbers and decide with real figures.

There’s no single answer, and we won’t claim the title. The right buyer for you is the one that closes in your area, shows you how it reached its number, puts its name and office address where you can check them, and lets you pick the date. Ask any buyer three things: who will close on this contract and when, can I see the math, and where is your office. Then compare the written offers side by side.

Don’t spend money on a kitchen or bathroom you’ll never use hoping a buyer pays you back for it; most remodels don’t return their cost at sale. Don’t sign with a buyer who won’t show you the math, or who asks for a long inspection period with an easy exit. Don’t stop paying the mortgage, the water, the taxes or the insurance: a scheduled closing isn’t a closed sale, and those bills stay yours until the sale actually closes. And don’t haul everything to the dump before you know whether your buyer will take it. Ours will.

Sometimes. If you owned the house and lived in it as your main home for at least two of the five years before the sale, federal law lets you exclude up to $250,000 of the gain, or up to $500,000 on a joint return. An inherited house is different, and usually in your favor: its basis is generally the fair market value on the date the owner died, so the taxable gain is normally only what the house gained after that. A rental or a second home gets neither the exclusion nor that step up, and a rental also carries depreciation recapture. Colorado starts from your federal taxable income, so what happens federally drives the state number. This is general information, not legal advice; confirm with a Colorado attorney or tax professional.

Commissions are negotiable in Colorado and there’s no set rate, but the arithmetic is simple: each percentage point on a three hundred thousand dollar sale is three thousand dollars, so five or six percent comes to fifteen to eighteen thousand dollars. It’s no longer one fee split two ways, though: the seller usually pays the listing agent, and buyer’s agent pay is negotiated separately since 2024, which means a seller may agree to a listing fee only, a listing fee plus a concession toward the buyer’s agent, or nothing toward the buyer’s side. Whatever you do agree to comes off the top before seller concessions and closing costs. A cash sale to us has no commission. The written offer is the number, your seller closing costs are covered, and what reaches you is that number less your mortgage payoff, any liens, prorated property taxes and any HOA balance.

It’s a rule of thumb, not a law or a contract term, and there’s no standard version of it. Different sources hang the name on unrelated ideas: some are buyer budgeting guides built around the number three (a multiple of income for the purchase price, months of expenses in reserve, years you plan to stay), and others are showing or staging checklists about the first three seconds, three feet and three rooms a buyer notices. If someone quotes it at you, ask which version they mean. None of them has any bearing on a cash sale, where no loan stands between you and closing.

It depends on the interest rate, the down payment, taxes, insurance and the buyer’s other debts, so lenders qualify people rather than quote one salary. A common guideline keeps the housing payment under roughly a quarter to a third of gross monthly income, though lenders stretch that when the rest of the file is strong. The takeaway for a seller: a financed buyer at that price has to clear the lender’s income, appraisal and underwriting tests, and the loan has to fund on time. A listed house can also draw a cash or investor buyer who skips all of it. A cash purchase from us has no loan, so none of those tests are in the deal. That certainty is part of what a lower number buys.