Where the Money Comes From
Our own funds. There is no lender approving the purchase, which is why we can buy buildings that cannot be financed and why our timetable does not depend on somebody else's underwriting.
It also means a specific thing on this site's subject: we are not asking you to fund any part of the transaction, at any stage, in any form.
Why Does That Need Spelling Out?
What We Hold Before Closing
Nothing of yours. No documents beyond what you choose to send us, no keys, no deposit from you, and no authority over anything.
Where a deposit is payable by us, it goes to a title company or an attorney's escrow account rather than to us, and it is held on terms set out in the contract.
What We Will Never Ask For
Your insurance proceeds. Not to hold, not as a deposit, not as security, not to be applied to a purchase price before closing. Under Article 3-A those funds have a legal character and moving them to a buyer before completion is not something a seller should be doing.
Authority over your claim. No assignment, no direction to pay, no power to speak to your insurer on your behalf.
A payment of any kind. No fee, no deposit, no cost of a report, no contribution to closing costs.
Do Buyers Actually Ask for Those Things?
How the Proceeds Get Handled in Our Contracts
It is a stated term rather than an assumption. Either you keep the proceeds and our price reflects that, or the proceeds come to us and the price reflects that instead. Both are ordinary and the difference between them should be visible in the number.
What we will not do is leave it vague, because a vague term about a fund with beneficiaries attached is the kind of thing that becomes an argument later.
What We Get Paid, and When
We earn the gap between what a damaged property costs to acquire and repair and what it is worth finished, and we earn it after the work, on resale or on letting. Nothing comes from you at any point.
That means our interest is in buying below finished value, which is exactly the interest you should assume we have. Everything on this site is written on the assumption you will read it with that in mind.
When We Are Genuinely Useful
Where the claim is denied or disputed and there is no money coming. Where a contractor has taken a draw and left the work unfinished. Where the damage is severe enough that no ordinary purchaser can finance or assess the building.
Those are the files where a buyer with its own funds and no lender does something a conventional sale cannot.
When We Are Not
Where the claim has paid properly, the frame survived and the values carry the work. Across Park Avenue, Brighton and much of the eastern suburbs that describes most of what we see, and our written figure says so rather than making you work it out.
The Ordinary Disclosures
We buy as principal, in our own entity, with our own funds, and we take title. We do not assign contracts. Nothing is charged to you at any stage, including if you decline. We are not brokers, not public adjusters, not contractors and not lawyers, and on a site about trust funds the last of those matters.
We buy fire-damaged residential property across Rochester, Monroe County and the wider region, in any condition, including where the insurance position is unresolved. Beyond this region we would be the wrong buyer.
Where to Start
Start a ledger of anything that has moved. Then read where the money goes on our page about how the process actually runs, and the sorting question on our page about how to tell local cash buyers apart.