I’m in the unfortunate position to be job hunting, so I have to answer unknown numbers. For years, I’ve gotten “I’d like to buy your house” spam calls. I’ve never been in a situation where I’d sell to a random caller. I can’t imagine one, either. I can imagine needing to sell my house, but I’d call a realtor or something. I wouldn’t engage a random cold-caller.
Does that ever work? Is it legit? I assume it must be profitable, because they keep doing it.
Yes they do and the answer is old people being taken advantage of
The biggest victims of phone scams are the elderly. Typically very socially isolated, lonely, and sometimes suffering from cognitive decline. Does anyone ever fall for it? You’ve got to ask yourself why the scammers would go through so much trouble if it never worked.
I’m not so sure this logic holds with how out of hand things have gotten. I’ve got automated spam calls that ask if I’m interested, I said yes, and they hung up on me.
It’s like the spam machine got left on over the weekend or something.
In that case they’re probably fishing for active numbers, seeing which ones are real out of the list they bought online. You should never say the word “yes,” when you’re on the phone with someone you don’t trust. Scammers will record that, clip it, and use it to cause all kinds of harm impersonating you
I just tell them whoever they’re calling for died. I let them bask in the awkwardness for a bit before they hang up.
Nonsense.
If a voice recording could be used with nefarious intent you wouldn’t be able to eat a meal in a restaurant without being recorded.
These absurd scams confused the hell outta me forever. Like are there really idiots falling for this tripe??? Then I read an article. It goes something like this. Hi there maggie, this is michael jackson, id like to marry you and mail you 10 gobzillion dollars today, you in???
The answer is 1/10,000 is stupid enough to fall for this and the scammers want 10,000 people to instantly reject their absurd claim. Those people would just waste their time. Its intentionally absurd to ferret out that one person in 10,000. Someone who believes you are deceased michael jackson who is in love with them? Thats a big fish on the line, a real rube, someone who will empty their bank account for you. Sadly, in reality its probably the elderly, lonely, mentally incapacitated, or folks lobotomized by religion. They are scumbags seeking rip off the vulnerable.
Human vultures
The “I want to buy your house” things are a little bit different, because they’re usually not technically scams (though they are definitely predatory). If you work with them, you will probably receive money in exchange for your house. It’s just that your sale price is likely to be far, far below what you could’ve received by listing it yourself on the open market.
They’re exclusively targeting people who don’t know how much their property is worth. Usually people in transitioning neighborhoods who bought their home 40 years ago for $10k, who don’t know that their property alone is worth $200k today and will happily take $80k cash from some rando on the phone because they think the 800% return is a great deal.
I’ve lived in neighborhoods like that for a while. The phone calls we receive are insane; in our old house, which we knew was worth $300k because we had just had it appraised to put it on the market, the guy on the phone offered us $65k sight unseen. I was like, “if you even took the twelve seconds to look at this property on Street View you’d know why that is a laughable idea.”
We sold our house last year and did work with one of those guys to at least get an idea of value and then went with a realtor and made about 30% more than the cash offer guy.
Based on random “offer” mailers I get, I’m a little shocked that the cash guy was within 30% of market value.
Same here. I had one of these bozos reach out to me and wouldn’t give me an exact price but said he bought a “similar” home nearby for $120k.
Nah…fuck off. I paid more than double of that for my house.
I really wish I could get my fucking phone number removed from wherever it is that these scumbags pull from because their “offers” are nowhere near reasonable and just a waste of everyone’s time.
I always ask for about 3x my estimated tax value. They ask why, and I tell them that I want to but another house that isn’t falling down around me.
they are thousands of independent investors, sometimes known as homevestors.com they seek around for homes in disrepair or hoarders or abandoned type. they will cold call and try to make friends to figure out the house situation and why its in a sorry state. they are very patient and understanding, and make clear how the house couldnt be sold through a market listing without major time and expense, and get into detail about all the effort that would be required. then they offer to pay cash off market as-is to take care of everything. typically they aim to calculate the cost required to get it sellable and then make $50-100k profit for the trouble. its a real business that serves a market need to get these homes utilized.
but they hire cold callers to read scripts and bother millions of people to find someone with pain about a house.
these people end up only making a handful of deals a year and sometime lose due to bad timing or unforeseen problems.
We call them house flippers and dont care for them
He way over-valued our home. It was a site unseen offer based on homes in the area. It was in need of major repairs that would make it difficult to sell on the market. Our realtor ended up buying it from us and then doing a huge renovation on it. She sold it for about double what the guy offered, but had to sink substantial funds into it that I just didn’t have.
Ooh I answered one of those at my grandparents once. Kept em going for a good 5 minutes before telling them I don’t own a house. They hung up on me.
I usually just give them the address 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Whenever I get any of those contacts, I ask for about 150k more than the absolute max I could get for it (150k… is about half of the total sellable price). Sight unseen, as-is.
I’d take that deal, but they usually don’t reply :(. Did have one guy ask if there was a pool in the basement to justify the price. Told him he’d have to buy it to find out.
In reality it needs a lot of expensive work I’d rather not pay to do (re-wiring, ripping out the cracked lathe and plaster walls and drywalling, kitchen remodel, etc) and they would be piiiiiiised when they took possession ;)
If someone actually took your offer, you might wanna check if you have any oil hiding under your house.
I have never heard of this one before.
I’ve been getting it for 20 years. Some fart across town used my number on a loan application. Since then, I get a bunch of spam for “Steve”. Funny enough I said yes to the last text asking me to sell Steve’s property. He seems to have corrected the error somewhat because my Steve spam has gone down.
Must be a regional thing I suppose? I mean I get lots of other stupid spam call variants.
when i looked up Steve (20 years ago) he was 30 years older than me. I’m not exactly a spring chicken here either. I’d hope the spam went down because he moved (or worse, died), but when my dad died we kept getting spam to the landline for him for, uh, still going so i guess many years?
You are a blessed individual. I get them frequently.
Sometimes they just really are giving away a MASSIVE YACHT!
My in-laws are considering selling an undeveloped property they own after being contacted that way.
