The First Rule: Your Disclosure Can End Your Sale
Washington requires Form 17 on most residential sales and gives the buyer three business days from delivery to rescind at their sole discretion. That much most sellers know.
What catches people is that the clock resets. Learn something afterwards that makes a disclosure inaccurate, amend it as the statute requires, and the buyer gets a fresh three business day exit from receiving the amendment. On a fire-damaged house where findings arrive in sequence, that can happen more than once.
We raise it before price because the defence is something you do early rather than something we can fix later: find out what is actually wrong before you sign, so the disclosure you write is the disclosure that stands.
Why Does a Buyer Volunteer This?
The Second Rule: A Denied Claim Is Not Necessarily Over
Washington's Insurance Fair Conduct Act gives a first party claimant unreasonably denied coverage a cause of action with up to treble damages, attorney's fees and litigation costs. It requires a written notice to the insurer and the Insurance Commissioner twenty days before filing, and skipping that step is fatal.
We take no part of anyone's claim and we are not lawyers. We mention it because owners arrive here believing a denial ended the matter, and in this state that is frequently wrong.
What We Buy
Fire-damaged residential property in Seattle and the nearer parts of King County, in any condition from smoke to bare foundation. Flat lots and steep ones. Older frame and post-war construction. Claims open, settled, denied and uninsured. Owner-occupied, tenanted, vacant and inherited.
Where we decline it is geography. Beyond the nearer suburbs we are the wrong buyer and will say so rather than take the enquiry and waste your fortnight.
How the Number Is Built
Finished value of a house on that parcel, or the parcel's value where the zoning supports more than what burned, less the cost of getting there, less carrying cost, less the excise tax, less margin.
Two lines make Seattle offers differ. Whether the buyer has priced any slope or foundation work the ground actually requires, which flat-lot models omit. And whether they have read what has been assessed, because a buyer quoting from photographs will discover things later and treat each discovery as a negotiation.
Why Do Offers on the Same House Vary So Widely?
Where Our Interests Diverge From Yours
We are the buyer. Not an adviser, not neutral. We benefit if you accept less and decide quickly.
The two rules above are the honest exceptions, and both happen to serve us as well as you, which is why you can rely on them rather than because we are generous. Everything else here is checkable: the Washington Legislature site for the statutes, the county assessor and recorder for the property, the city's mapping for the zoning and the ground.
We are also not brokers, not public adjusters, not contractors, not contract assigners and not lawyers. That last one matters here, because both the disclosure mechanism and the claim remedy turn on sequence and drafting.
When a Different Buyer Is the Right One
A builder, where the lot permits more than what burned. On parcels with real capacity they price the land rather than the house, and they will beat us.
A rehabber, where the framing came through. Restoring is their business and they can pay closer to finished value than a buyer pricing a rebuild.
Nobody — restore it. Where the repair sits well below finished value, restoring nets more, and it produces a settled disclosure rather than an evolving one. In a Form 17 state that second point is worth more than it sounds.
Why Point Me Away From a Sale?
Reaching Us
Send an address through any form on this site. Before you deal with us, ask us the questions on our page about how to tell local cash buyers apart, and read what applies on our page covering Form 17, IFCA and the excise tax.