One: Buy the Property Without Mentioning the Fund
The obvious one. Where a fire loss crosses sixty per cent of aggregate policy limits, proceeds sit with the municipality. An owner who does not know that exists may sell the building and never pursue money that was recoverable.
A buyer who says nothing gets a clean purchase and an owner who never asks a difficult question later.
What stops us: the whole of this site says otherwise in writing, publicly, before you speak to anyone. That is not a character reference, it is a constraint we have built on purpose, because a business that depends on sellers being uninformed does not survive the first seller who reads the statute.
Two: Price the Property as If the Fund Were Ours
Subtler and more common. A buyer can quietly assume the escrow will come to them and put that assumption into a higher number, which looks generous until the assumption is tested.
The fund attaches to the named insured rather than to the land, so it does not simply pass with a deed. An offer built on it is an offer that will be renegotiated.
What stops us: we would rather show you four lines you can check than one number you cannot. Our figures set out finished value, cost of the work, carrying cost and margin separately, and no line in them is your insurance money. The statutory position is on our page covering the fire escrow.
How Would I Catch a Buyer Doing This?
Three: Use the Clock Against You
The one with real leverage in it. The escrow holds your money until work is proved, and the vacancy licence charges more the longer nothing happens, escalating to $3,500 a year at five years with late fees and a debt to the city on top.
A buyer who understands both can simply wait, let the pressure build, and improve their position by doing nothing at all.
What stops us: arithmetic rather than restraint. A property deteriorating while we wait is a property we are buying in worse condition, and a seller squeezed into accepting is a seller who spends the closing looking for a way out. Slow files cost us more than they gain. That is a duller reason than integrity and it is considerably more reliable, which is why we are telling you the reason rather than asserting the virtue.
How We Actually Make Money
We buy below what the finished property is worth, do or arrange the work, and keep the difference less costs. Nothing is charged to you: no fee, no commission, no deduction, no cost for a figure and none for declining one.
Which means we want files where a genuine gap exists and have no interest in files where it does not. On solid Cincinnati masonry that came through a fire, that gap frequently belongs to a rehabber rather than to us, and our written figure says so.
What We Are Not
Not brokers, not public adjusters, not contractors, not lawyers. We buy as principal, in our own entity, with our own funds, and we take title. The contract is not assigned and nobody else is introduced to your property between signature and closing.
We also do not pursue your escrow release or correspond with the city about it. You are the named insured, that relationship is yours, and it outlives any sale that does not complete.
What We Buy
Fire-damaged residential property across Cincinnati and Hamilton County, in any condition from smoke to cleared lot. In the city, in the suburbs and in the townships. Claims open, settled, denied and uninsured. Owner-occupied, tenanted, vacant and inherited.
Beyond this county the statutory picture changes and we would be the wrong buyer.
To start, send an address through any form here. Before you do, follow the money on our page about how the process actually runs, and read the questions on our page about how to tell local cash buyers apart.