What Happens After Accepting a Cash Offer on a House?

After you accept a cash offer on a house in the UK, the sale stops depending on mortgage lenders and starts depending on lawyers. You confirm the offer in writing, both sides instruct solicitors, and the buyer produces proof of funds and passes ID and anti-money-laundering checks. Your solicitor issues the contract pack; the buyer's solicitor raises enquiries and orders searches. Many cash buyers also send a surveyor. Once enquiries are answered you exchange contracts — that is the moment the sale becomes legally binding — and complete on an agreed date. With a genuine cash buyer and a responsive solicitor, seven to twenty-eight days is realistic. The legal work, not the money, sets the pace.

• 7–28 daystypical cash sale, offer to completion
• 16–24 weekstypical open-market sale
• 75–85%of market value from a genuine cash buyer
• 1 in 4agreed UK sales that collapse before completion

The first 48 hours matter more than the next two weeks

Most people treat the moment of acceptance as the finish line. It isn't. It's the starting gun, and what you do in the two days that follow does more to determine whether this sale completes in three weeks or three months than anything else.

Here is what should happen, roughly in order.

Get the offer in writing. An email from the buying company stating the offer figure, the target completion date, whether it is subject to survey, and who pays the legal fees. If they will not put that in an email, that tells you something useful about how the rest of the sale is going to go.

Ask for proof of funds immediately. Not next week, not after the survey. Now. We come back to how to check this properly further down, because it deserves its own section.

Instruct a solicitor. If the buyer offers to pay for a conveyancer from their own panel, that is a genuine saving — several hundred pounds — but you are entitled to choose your own, and if you have any doubt about the buyer, choosing your own is the safer call. A solicitor whose repeat business comes from the buyer is not conflicted in any formal sense, but they are not going to chase that buyer as hard as one you're paying yourself.

Then start pulling paperwork together, because this is where sales silt up. Your conveyancer will send you a TA6 Property Information Form and a TA10 Fittings and Contents Form, plus a TA7 if the property is leasehold. Alongside those you will want: proof of ID and address, your title deeds or Land Registry title number, the EPC, FENSA or CERTASS certificates for replacement windows, Building Regulations completion certificates or Gas Safe/HETAS paperwork for a boiler or stove, any planning permission for an extension, guarantees for damp-proofing, timber treatment, a new roof, or cavity wall insulation, and — if leasehold — the management pack, ground rent and service charge statements, and the buildings insurance schedule.

That leasehold management pack is worth flagging on its own. Managing agents routinely take two to six weeks to produce one and charge £200–£400 for the privilege. If you own a flat and you want a fast sale, order it the day you accept the offer. Every fast leasehold sale I've seen that went wrong went wrong because nobody ordered the pack until week three.

Who is actually doing what

A cash sale has fewer moving parts than a mortgaged one, which is exactly why it's quicker. It helps to know who is responsible for which bit, because when things go quiet you'll know who to chase.

One thing that surprises sellers: a cash buyer can legally skip searches entirely. There is no lender insisting on a CON29, so if the buyer is confident, they can proceed on indemnity insurance or on no searches at all. Genuine professional buyers often do exactly this, and it can strip two to four weeks off the timeline. If a buyer tells you they're waiving searches, that isn't a red flag — it's usually a sign they know what they're doing.

Proof of funds: how to check it properly

This is the part most sellers get wrong, and it's the part that costs them weeks.

"Proof of funds" means documentary evidence that the buyer holds, right now, cleared money sufficient to buy your house. What it does not mean: a screenshot of an online banking balance, a letter from a director saying the company "has access to funding facilities", an investor term sheet, or a promise that money is "being released from another completion next week".

What you want is one of two things. Either a bank or building society statement dated within the last 30 days, in the buyer's name, showing the balance — or, better, a letter from the buyer's solicitor confirming they hold or have sight of cleared funds for the purchase. The solicitor's letter is stronger because a solicitor is putting their regulated name to it.

The other check takes ninety seconds and almost nobody does it: look the company up on the free Companies House register. You are looking at incorporation date, whether accounts are filed and up to date, whether the company is active or has a proposal to strike off, and whether the directors are attached to a trail of dissolved companies. A quick-sale firm founded eight months ago with a single £1 share and overdue accounts is not going to buy your house with its own money.

Then check whether they are a member of the National Association of Property Buyers (NAPB) and registered with The Property Ombudsman (TPO). NAPB members must be TPO-registered, which gives you a free, independent complaints route with the power to make a compensation award if the firm behaves badly. It is not a guarantee of a good price. It is a guarantee that there is somewhere to go if things go wrong, and that matters more than most sellers realise until they need it. Our guide to the best house buying companies covers which firms hold which memberships.

Money laundering checks cut both ways, by the way. Your own solicitor is legally obliged to verify your identity and, in some cases, the source of your funds — under the Money Laundering Regulations, this is not optional and it is not personal. Have a passport or driving licence and a recent utility bill or council tax statement ready and this takes a day. Send a blurry photo of an expired passport and it takes a fortnight.

The realistic timeline, stage by stage

Every quick-sale website publishes a "7 days!" timeline. Some sales genuinely do complete in seven days. Most take a bit longer, and the honest version looks like this.

Two things reliably blow this timetable apart. The first is a title problem nobody knew about — an unregistered strip of land at the bottom of the garden, a missing Building Regulations certificate for a 2009 conservatory, a restrictive covenant, or a lease with fewer than 80 years left. The second is probate. If you are selling an inherited property, you cannot complete until the grant of probate is issued, and that currently runs at roughly eight to sixteen weeks from application. A cash buyer will happily agree terms and wait, but no buyer on earth can make HMCTS go faster.

The survey, and the moment the price can move

Almost every professional cash buyer sends a surveyor, usually a RICS-registered valuer, within the first week or two. This is entirely reasonable — they are committing six figures on the basis of photographs and a postcode, and they want a human to confirm the roof exists.

What happens next separates the good firms from the bad.

A good buyer's surveyor confirms the offer, or adjusts it by a small amount for something genuinely unforeseen and evidences why: a damp report, a quote for a new roof, a structural engineer's note on a crack. A bad buyer's surveyor produces a vague downward revision of 5–15%, delivered by phone, three days before your agreed completion date, when you have already booked the removals van and given notice on your rental.

That is not a survey. That is a negotiating tactic, and it works because by that point you are emotionally and financially committed.

You can defend against it. Get the initial offer in writing with the words "subject to survey" or "not subject to survey" made explicit. Ask, before you accept, what the firm's average reduction between offer and completion is — the honest ones will tell you, and the honest answer is usually "sometimes, a few per cent, for a specific reason". Ask for the surveyor's report, or at least the specific findings behind any reduction, in writing. And if a reduction lands late with no evidence, remember you can still walk. You have not exchanged. You owe nothing.

• Open market sale price 95–100%
• Strong cash offer 82–85%
• Typical cash buyer 75–85%
• Treat with suspicion 90%+ advertised

What it actually costs you: a worked example

Numbers make this concrete. Take a three-bed semi in the Midlands with an open-market value of £250,000, and compare a cash sale at 82% against a standard estate agency sale.

Roughly £35,500 to save four months and remove the risk of collapse. Whether that is a good trade depends entirely on your circumstances, and I want to be straight about it: for most people, in most situations, it is not. If you have time, use it. Time is worth more than any negotiating tactic.

But if you are facing repossession, if a chain has just collapsed on you for the second time, if you're funding care fees, if you're carrying an empty inherited property that costs £600 a month in council tax premium and insurance, or if you're a landlord exiting a portfolio — then £35,500 buys certainty, and certainty has a real price. Run your own version of this table with your actual monthly carrying cost before you decide. Start with a realistic figure from our house valuation guide rather than the number you'd like to be true.

Exchange of contracts: the only date that counts

Everything up to this point is reversible. Exchange is where that stops.

In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, exchange happens when the two solicitors formally swap signed contracts, usually over the phone under the Law Society formula, and it makes the sale legally binding on both sides. The buyer normally pays a deposit — 10% is the convention, though with quick-sale firms it is often smaller or waived, and that is worth knowing because a smaller deposit means a smaller penalty if they pull out. Completion date is fixed at exchange. If the buyer fails to complete, you can serve a notice to complete, keep the deposit and sue for losses; if you fail to complete, the same applies in reverse.

Scotland works differently and better. There, the missives are concluded much earlier in the process, and once concluded the deal is binding — which is why gazumping is rare north of the border and endemic south of it.

On completion day, the buyer's solicitor sends the money, your solicitor redeems any outstanding mortgage, deducts fees and sends the balance to you, and you hand over the keys. Funds usually land in your account the same day, though a same-day CHAPS transfer arriving after about 3pm can slip to the next working morning. Don't book a same-day onward purchase completion with no buffer if you can avoid it.

Around one in four agreed sales in the UK falls through before this point. The overwhelming majority of those failures are mortgage refusals and chain collapses — neither of which exists in a genuine cash sale. That is the actual product you're buying.

Red flags, in order of how much they should worry you

1. They ask you for money. No legitimate cash buyer charges a seller an upfront fee, a "valuation fee", a "survey deposit" or an "administration charge". Stop and walk away.
2. Proof of funds never quite arrives. Promised, delayed, then a different document arrives that isn't a bank statement. This usually means they intend to find another buyer and assign the contract.
3. A lock-out or exclusivity agreement with teeth. Being asked to sign something preventing you from talking to anyone else for eight weeks, with a fee if you do, is a serious imposition. Read it. Ideally have your solicitor read it.
4. Late, unevidenced price reductions. Covered above. It is the sector's oldest trick.
5. No NAPB membership and no TPO registration. Not automatically disqualifying, but it removes your only free route to redress.
6. Pressure to use their solicitor and only their solicitor. Free legals are a normal, genuine perk. Insisting on it is not.
7. An offer above 90% of market value. The economics simply do not work at that level for a company buying with its own money. Either the valuation is inflated so it can be cut later, or they are not really the buyer.

When accepting a cash offer is the wrong decision

An honest guide has to include this bit.

Don't sell to a cash buyer if you have six months or more and no financial pressure. A well-priced house on the open market will get you £30,000–£50,000 more on a £250,000 property, and that is a life-changing sum for most households.

Don't do it if your property is genuinely desirable and correctly priced — a good family home in a decent catchment will sell in weeks, and the discount buys you nothing. Don't do it if you're in negative equity or the offer won't clear your mortgage, because your lender has to consent and often won't. Don't do it if the only reason you're considering it is that one agent has had the property on the market for three months at a price they talked you into; the fix there is a price correction and possibly a different agent, not a 20% haircut. And don't do it if you haven't first checked the middle-ground options — a modern method of auction, a fixed-fee online agent, or simply re-listing with better photographs at a realistic figure.

There is a sensible middle path that too few sellers take: get a cash offer, in writing, and treat it as your floor. Then market the property properly for six or eight weeks knowing that if nothing lands, you have a guaranteed exit. That costs you nothing and it changes the psychology of the whole process. Comparing several offers side by side — which is what Ready Steady Sell exists to help with — is how you find out whether the first number you were given was actually competitive.

Frequently asked questions

Can a cash buyer pull out after I've accepted?

Yes, right up until exchange of contracts, and without penalty. That is true of every buyer in England and Wales, cash or not. The practical protection is a buyer with a track record, verified funds, a TPO registration and a written offer — not a legal one.

Do I still need a solicitor if the buyer is paying cash?

Yes. Transferring registered title at HM Land Registry requires conveyancing whoever is paying. What changes is that there is no lender's conveyancing requirements to satisfy, which removes a large chunk of the work and most of the waiting.

Should I let the buyer pay my legal fees?

Usually yes — it's a genuine £800–£1,500 saving and it's standard practice in this sector. Get the scope in writing, though: some firms cover the basic conveyancing but not disbursements, leasehold packs or expedited searches, and those can add £300–£500. If you have any doubts about the buyer at all, pay for your own and keep the relationship clean.

How quickly will the money actually reach my bank account?

On completion day, usually within a few hours of the buyer's solicitor releasing funds. Your solicitor first redeems any mortgage and deducts their fees, then sends you the balance by CHAPS. Transfers initiated after mid-afternoon can land the following working morning.

What happens if the survey comes back with a problem?

The buyer will either proceed at the agreed price, propose a reduction, or withdraw. Ask for the specific finding and the evidence behind any proposed reduction. If it's a real defect with a real quote attached, a negotiation is fair. If it's vague and it arrives days before completion, it's a tactic, and you are free to say no.

Can I accept a cash offer on a property going through probate?

You can agree the sale, but you cannot complete until the grant of probate is issued — currently around eight to sixteen weeks from application, sometimes longer where the estate is complex. Most professional cash buyers are comfortable waiting and will hold the offer. Get that commitment in writing, with an expiry date you're happy with.

Is a cash buyer the same as a chain-free buyer?

No, and the distinction costs people money. A chain-free buyer has no property to sell but may still need a mortgage — which means a lender, a valuation, and a fortnight of risk. A true cash buyer has the money in an account today. Ask which one you're dealing with, and see our property jargon guide if the terminology starts flying.

The short version

Accepting a cash offer removes the two things that break most UK house sales: the mortgage lender and the chain. What it doesn't remove is conveyancing, and conveyancing runs at the speed of whoever is slowest — which, more often than sellers expect, is the seller. Get your certificates together, return your forms the day they arrive, order the leasehold pack immediately, and verify the buyer's funds before you take the property off the market.

Do those four things and a genuine cash sale completes in two to four weeks with very little drama. Skip them and you'll spend six weeks wondering why the "seven day sale" is still going.

Ready Steady Sell, founded by Lisa Hayes, was built because too many homeowners were accepting the first offer they were given without knowing whether it was competitive. We compare checked and vetted buyers so you can see several genuine offers side by side, free and with no obligation. If you want to understand what the market is really paying, our industry data and our breakdown of how cash house buyers operate are the honest place to start.