Should You Take a Cash Offer on Your St. George Home?

If you own a home in Washington County you’ve had the mail: the postcards made to look handwritten, the texts that open with your first name and your street, the “we buy houses” signs zip tied to a fence by the freeway ramp. Most of those offers are real. Whether one is a good offer is a different question, and the answer depends almost entirely on which kind of cash buyer is on the other end.

Two things get called a cash offer

The first is an end buyer who doesn’t need a loan. St. George has an unusual number of them: retirees, households cashing out of California, Utah County families trading up. Local tallies over the past few years have put roughly four in ten Washington County purchases at all cash, well above the national share, which the National Association of Realtors put at 26% of sales in July 2026. These buyers pay market price, often full list, because they want to live in the house. What “cash” buys you as the seller is certainty: no appraisal to come in low, no loan to fall through in week five, and a closing that can happen as soon as the title company is ready. This is the cash offer you hope for, and here it usually arrives through a listing, not a postcard.

The second is an investor: a flipper, a landlord, a national iBuyer, or a wholesaler who plans to hand your contract to one of those. They’re buying to resell or rent, so the price is built backward from what the house will fetch once they’re done with it, minus their costs, minus their profit. Same word, different math. Everything below is about the second kind.

What the discount usually looks like

Start with the research. A 2024 study out of UC San Diego looked at millions of sales going back to 1980 and found that cash buyers pay about 10% less than buyers with a mortgage for the same house, and about 8% less in the more recent data since 2013. That’s the general price of certainty, and plenty of ordinary sellers pay it willingly.

Investor offers start well below that. The rule of thumb flippers work from is to pay about 70% of what the home will be worth after repairs, less the cost of those repairs. On a St. George home that would list at $500,000 fixed up and needs $40,000 of work, that pencils out to around $310,000. The number on the postcard may be friendlier than that, but the postcard isn’t the offer. The offer comes after the walk through, and the walk through is what resets it.

The national iBuyers sit somewhere between the two. Opendoor advertises cash offers in St. George; Offerpad doesn’t list Utah at all. Opendoor’s service fee has run around 5%, plus about 1% in closing costs, plus whatever its inspection deducts for repairs, and the offer itself is set below what the company expects to resell for. Convenient, and at least the math is published. Read the repair deduction line closely, because that’s where the number moves.

Wholesalers are the ones to be most careful with. Utah doesn’t require a license to put a house under contract and assign that contract to someone else for a fee, and that’s the whole business: they never intended to own your home, and the “cash” is somebody else’s. If the buyer they go looking for at their price doesn’t materialize, the deal quietly dies before the deadline and you’ve lost the weeks. Ask, in writing, whether the person in front of you intends to close in their own name or assign the contract.

What speed is worth right now

The main thing a cash buyer sells you is time. In the current St. George market a well priced listing takes about five weeks to go under contract and another month or so to close, so figure two to three months from listing to money in your account. A cash deal with a Utah title company can close in a week or two, since Utah settles through title and escrow with no attorney step. The speed you’re buying is about two months.

Two months is worth real money in a few situations. An inherited house sitting empty on a vacant home policy and a full property tax bill. A job start date in another state. A roof and an air conditioner you can’t fund before a sale. A tenant situation you’re done managing. In those cases a discount for speed can be a fair trade, and knowing your number is what lets you decide how big a discount is fair.

It’s a poor trade when the only reason is that it sounds easier. Run the comparison net to net. A listed sale costs roughly 6 to 8% of the price in commissions and closing costs, so a genuine 10% under market cash offer with no commission lands within a few percent of what listing would net. But the offers that come in the mail rarely sit at 10% under. They commonly sit at 25 to 35% under, and on a $500,000 home that’s a gap of somewhere around $100,000 for two months of patience.

The Utah twist

Utah is a nondisclosure state, and it cuts against you here in a way it doesn’t in Arizona or Nevada. When a flipper resells your old house next spring, that price won’t appear in any public record. You’ll never get the after the fact check a seller in Mesa or Henderson gets, and the comps a cash buyer lays out on your kitchen table are the comps they chose. The only defense is walking in with your own number.

The contract has a twist too. Utah’s standard purchase contract, the REPC, runs on deadlines. A cash offer strikes the financing and appraisal deadline, which is where much of the certainty comes from. But the due diligence deadline is still there unless the buyer waives it, and until it passes the buyer can cancel for any reason, or none, and take their earnest money with them. “Cash, as is” isn’t binding on the day you sign. It’s binding the day the due diligence deadline passes. A short due diligence period and a large earnest money deposit are what make a cash offer real. A long one with token earnest money is an option on your house, and you’re the one handing it over for free.

How to answer the letter

1. Get an independent read on what the house is worth as it stands, before you respond. Not the buyer’s number, and not a national estimate working from thin Utah data.
2. Ask three things in writing: will you close in your own name or assign the contract, what are the due diligence period and the earnest money, and is the offer net of every fee, credit, and repair deduction.
3. Compare net to net. What lands in your account from the cash offer, against what a listed sale would net after commissions and closing costs, starting from the same value.
4. If what you want is speed rather than a discount, remember that about four in ten buyers here already pay cash, and a home priced to the current market reaches them through a listing, at market price.