We buy houses in Fresno, California as-is, for cash.

Our average across 287 closings is 15 days. The fastest we have ever closed was 72 hours. We’ll be straight with you about that 72-hour number: it took a completely clean preliminary title report, one owner on title, no liens, and an escrow officer willing to push. It’s real, but don’t build your plans around it.

The limit is almost never our money — it’s how long the title company needs to pull the prelim and clear whatever shows up on it. A lien, a PACE assessment, a missing signature from an ex-spouse, or an unsettled estate all add time, and we’ll tell you which one you’re dealing with after we see the report rather than guessing beforehand. It also works the other way: if you need longer because you’re waiting on a new place or a kid to finish the school year, we’ll close on whatever date you name.

Less than a fixed-up house sells for on the open market, and we’re upfront about that. We start from what your house would be worth renovated, then subtract the repairs, the cost of reselling it, and our profit. On the Fresno houses we buy, the repair number is usually the biggest variable — cosmetic work versus a foundation or a full re-pipe can swing the offer by fifty thousand dollars. What we won’t do is quote you a high number to get the contract signed and then renegotiate after inspection. If we say $213,000, we close at $213,000.

Yes — and this is one of the most common reasons a Fresno sale falls apart with a retail buyer, so it’s worth understanding. PACE and HERO financing for solar, windows, or HVAC isn’t a normal loan. It’s repaid as a line item on your property tax bill, and it sits in first position ahead of your mortgage. Plenty of Central Valley homeowners signed one years ago and genuinely forgot, then it surfaces on the preliminary title report mid-escrow. Because it outranks the buyer’s new loan, most lenders won’t fund until it’s paid off, which is where deals die.

We’re not borrowing, so it doesn’t blow up our purchase. We get the payoff demand at the start of escrow instead of week three, and it comes out of proceeds at closing. If the payoff is more than the panels were worth — which happens — we’ll tell you and we’ll work through it with you rather than walking. To check whether you have one, look at your Fresno County tax bill for a special assessment or energy financing line.

It depends entirely on how the house was held, and a lot of Fresno estates have a faster path than people assume. If it was in a living trust, there’s no probate at all — once you’re confirmed as successor trustee, you can generally sell within a few weeks. If it has to go through probate, you can’t sell until the court gives the personal representative authority, and whether you need a confirmation hearing depends on whether that authority is full or limited.

Here’s the part worth knowing locally: California raised the threshold for the simplified primary-residence petition to $750,000 in 2025. Fresno’s median sale price is in the low $400,000s, which means a large share of Fresno estates now qualify for that shorter route instead of full probate. Ask your probate attorney specifically about it — it can save months. We’ve closed with executors and trustees before and we’re comfortable working on the court’s schedule, including using a mobile notary if you’re out of state.

Usually yes, unless you move into it — and that’s often what pushes heirs to sell. Under Prop 19, a child can only keep a parent’s low Prop 13 tax base if the house was the parent’s primary residence, the child makes it their own primary residence within one year, and the value increase stays under the indexed cap (about $1.04 million for transfers through February 2027). If the house was a rental or a second home, it gets reassessed to full market value, no exceptions.

Practically, that means an inherited Fresno house you don’t intend to live in starts costing meaningfully more in taxes from the date of death, and every month of a slow sale adds to it. There’s a repeal initiative circulating, but nothing has changed yet. Confirm your own numbers with a CPA or the Fresno County Assessor before you decide — we’re telling you the mechanics, not advising you on your taxes.

Not with us. Fresno’s Rental Housing Improvement Act requires every residential rental in the city to be registered, and properties get baseline inspections through a random sampling process. If yours came up and the inspector wrote violations, you’re looking at repair costs, a re-inspection, and a deadline — which is exactly the situation a lot of small Fresno landlords call us about.

We buy with the violations open and handle the corrections ourselves after closing. Bring us the notice and we’ll factor the work into the offer honestly rather than pretending we didn’t see it. One housekeeping note: registration has to be updated when ownership changes, so that transfers to us at closing.

Yes, and you should not try to empty it out first. Fresno has no local rent control, but California’s Tenant Protection Act still applies: after twelve months of tenancy a landlord needs a just-cause reason to end it, and a no-fault termination requires paying the tenant one month’s rent in relocation assistance at the time the notice is served. Single-family homes and condos are usually exempt from the rent cap under Costa-Hawkins, but the just-cause rules are a separate question.

Selling to us means none of that lands on you. We buy the property occupied, inherit the lease, and deal with the tenant relationship ourselves. Non-paying tenants, month-to-month, a lease with two years left — bring us the situation and we’ll price it.

This is the single most common reason people find us, and it’s a structural problem with Fresno’s older housing stock, not a failure on your part. Much of central Fresno — the Tower District, the Fresno High area, Lowell, and the neighborhoods around them — is pre-1960 construction. A lot of Fresno’s retail buyers are using FHA financing, and an FHA appraiser will call out peeling paint, an inoperable furnace or AC, exposed wiring, roof life, and a dozen other things. Once that report exists, the deal is dead until someone spends money.

We don’t use financing, so no appraiser sets conditions on our purchase. There’s no repair addendum and no lender to satisfy. If you’ve already been through a failed escrow, send us the inspection report — it saves us both time and it usually makes our offer more accurate, not lower.

No. We know what a Fresno summer does to a house with a dead condenser, and we know what a new system costs — Oscar prices it the same way he’d price it for a job. A broken AC is a line on the repair estimate, not a reason we walk. Same for the roof, the sewer lateral, the panel, and the slab.

None. No commission, because there’s no agent. No listing costs, no repair credits, no staging, no fee for the offer itself. We pay the standard closing costs. Whatever’s still owed on the mortgage and any liens get paid out of proceeds at closing, and the rest is wired to you. The number on the offer is the number you’re working from — we’ll show you the estimated settlement statement before you sign anything.

We’re buying, not listing — but we’ll tell you honestly that not every house ends up in our own renovation pipeline. Most of what we close, we close ourselves: we fund the purchase, do the work, and either resell the house or hold it as a Fresno rental. Sometimes a property doesn’t fit what we’re set up to renovate, and in that case we bring in another local investor we’ve closed with before.

What doesn’t change either way: the offer amount, the closing date you picked, and the fact that you’re dealing with Fred or Oscar from the first call through escrow. We’ll tell you which situation yours is before you sign, not after. What we won’t do is tie up your house on a contract and then go looking for somebody to take it off our hands while your clock runs — if we sign, we close.