A man once asked us to close on his mother’s house in nine days because a buyer for his own place would not wait. We did it in eight. That is the exception, not the brochure, and the honest version of this process has more waiting in it than anybody advertises. So here is the unglamorous version. Lake City Home Buyers buys houses in Lake City and across Columbia County with our own funds, closes through a title company, and wires the money the same way any other sale does. No listing, no showings, no financing contingency sitting on an underwriter’s desk in another state. What follows is the whole process in order, including the parts that take longer than anybody wants them to.
What a Cash Offer Actually Means Around Here
A real cash offer means the buyer has the money and intends to be the one who owns the house at the end. That sounds obvious. It is not, because a large share of the “we buy houses” outfits sending postcards around Columbia County have no intention of buying anything. They put a house under contract, then shop that contract to an actual investor and collect the spread. That is wholesaling, and it is legal, and plenty of people do it honestly. The problem is what happens when nobody bites. The contract gets extended, then extended again, and then it dies three weeks before the sellers were supposed to move.
Josiah spent eleven years as a licensed realtor before starting this, specializing in for-sale-by-owner and investor transactions, which is a polite way of saying he watched a lot of deals fall apart in the last two weeks. That is most of the reason this company exists. If we tell you a number, we are the ones bringing it. You are welcome to ask us directly whether we intend to assign the contract, and the answer will be no. Ask every other buyer who calls you the same question and pay attention to how long it takes them to answer.
The other thing worth knowing is that a cash sale is not automatically the better deal. It is a trade. You are trading some amount of top-end price for speed, certainty, and not having to fix or clean anything. Whether that trade makes sense depends entirely on your situation, and there are plenty of houses in this county where it does not. We will tell you that when it is true.
The Process, Start to Finish
Five stages, and only one of them is fast. Here they are in the order they actually happen.
Step one: the first phone call
The first conversation is short and mostly boring. Where is the house, who is on the deed, is there a mortgage, and what is going on that has you thinking about selling. That last one matters more than people expect, because it changes what a good outcome looks like. Somebody facing a sale date at the courthouse needs a different plan than somebody whose mother’s house has been sitting empty since February and the lawn is starting to look like a public safety issue.
We also ask whether anyone else has to agree to the sale. In Columbia County this comes up constantly, because a lot of property here has been in the same family for two or three generations. If four siblings are on the deed and two of them live out of state and one of them is not speaking to the other three, that is not a dealbreaker, but it changes the timeline and we would rather know on day one than day thirty.
Nobody needs to have anything figured out before this call. You do not need a repair estimate, a payoff quote, a survey, or a cleaned-out garage. Half the reason people put off calling is the sense that they need to get the house in order first, which is a bit like tidying up before the housekeeper comes, except the housekeeper is buying the mess.
Step two: how we look at the house
One visit, usually thirty to forty-five minutes, and you do not need to be there if you would rather not be. We are looking at four things: the roof, the systems, the structure, and anything that is going to surprise us later. We are not looking at your housekeeping, your carpet, or the wallpaper somebody put up in 1987. We have bought a house that had been used, literally and enthusiastically, as a chicken coop on the inside. Your kitchen is fine.
Roof age is the first thing we check, and in this county it is usually the thing that decides whether a house can even be sold the normal way. Insurers here have gotten strict, and roof condition is the single biggest variable in whether a buyer can get a binder. That is not an abstract concern. Citizens Property Insurance policies in Columbia County dropped from 677 at the end of 2024 to 279 as of May 31, 2026, which means most of this county is now being underwritten by private carriers with their own opinions about a twenty-year-old shingle roof.
After that we are looking at era-typical stuff. About half the housing inside the Lake City city limits was built before 1980, and roughly a third of housing countywide is that old, according to Census ACS 2024 five-year estimates. That tells us where to look before we ever walk in. Out in the county we are also looking at the well and the septic, and whether anybody can find a permit or an inspection record for either one.
Step three: where the number comes from
The offer is built backward from what the house is worth once it is fixed, minus what fixing it costs, minus what it costs to hold and resell it, minus a margin. That margin is how the lights stay on. We will show you the math if you want to see it, and some people do, and that conversation is usually more useful than any amount of reassurance.
Two local factors move that number more than people expect. The first is which side of the city line the house sits on. As of the 2024 tax year, the total millage inside Lake City city limits was 19.2003, versus 13.4997 in the unincorporated county, per the Columbia County Property Appraiser. That is roughly $19.20 per thousand of taxable value inside the city and about $13.50 outside it. On a holding period of several months, that gap is real money.
The second is how long the house would take to resell. Median days on market across the Lake City area ran 87 days in June 2026, up from 76 a year earlier, based on Realtor.com market data. Slower resale means more carrying cost, and carrying cost comes out of the offer. When somebody asks why the number is what it is, that is usually most of the answer, and it is also why offers on identical houses can differ from one month to the next.
Step four: title, the part that actually takes time
People assume the inspection is the bottleneck. It almost never is. Title is. The title company pulls the chain of ownership going back decades and looks for anything attached to the property that has to be cleared before it can transfer cleanly. Old liens nobody remembers. A contractor who never got paid in 2009. A judgment from a lawsuit the current owner had honestly forgotten about. An heir who signed nothing because nobody could find him.
We bought a vacant lot once and had the septic system drained. A month later sewage started backing up with no visible cause, and the investigation eventually turned up an old undisclosed easement the title company had missed, one that let the neighboring property share that same septic system. That turned into a serious dispute and ultimately a title insurance settlement, and we ended up selling the lot to the neighbor. It is the kind of thing you cannot see from the road, and it is exactly why we do not skip this step even when everyone is in a hurry.
Most title work in Columbia County is clean and takes a couple of weeks. Some of it takes longer. If yours is one of the complicated ones, we would rather find it in week one than have it detonate at closing, and a title problem discovered early is usually fixable. You can pull your own property’s recorded documents through the Columbia County Clerk of Court if you want to look before we do.
Step five: closing, and what “seven days” really means
Our fastest close has been seven days. That is a real number and not a marketing one, but it requires everything to line up: clear title, one owner, no mortgage payoff that has to come from a lender with a two-week turnaround, and a seller who actually wants to move that fast. Most closings land somewhere between two and four weeks, and a fair number of people ask us to slow down rather than speed up, because they have not found the next place yet.
Closing happens at a title company or attorney’s office, you sign, and the money is wired. There are no commissions coming out of your side, because there is no agent on either end of the transaction. We cover normal closing costs. You will not get a settlement statement full of line items you have never heard of and cannot dispute, which the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has a decent plain-English explainer on if you want to understand what those documents normally look like.
You keep what you want and leave what you do not. Furniture, the deep freezer in the carport, thirty years of paperwork in the hall closet, the boat trailer that has not moved since the Obama administration. We handle cleanout. That is genuinely part of the deal and not a favor we grudgingly extend.
What We Do Not Ask You to Do
No repairs. No cleaning. No staging, no lockbox, no strangers walking through your bedroom on a Saturday. No appraisal, which matters more than people realize, because appraisals are where financed deals on older Columbia County houses tend to die. No inspection contingency that lets a buyer come back three weeks later asking for six thousand dollars off because the water heater is original.
You also do not have to make a decision on the spot. We give a number, we explain how we got there, and then you can sit with it. Talk to your family, talk to an agent, get a second offer from somebody else. Josiah is Christian and runs this the way he was raised to, which in practice means we would rather lose a deal than talk somebody into one they will regret. If a traditional listing nets you more and you can wait, that is the right answer and we will say so.
Who This Is Not Right For
If your house is in good shape, you are not in a hurry, and you can tolerate a couple of months of showings, list it. You will very likely net more. An agent earns their fee on a clean, well-maintained house in a decent subdivision, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Lake City Home Buyers is a better fit when speed, certainty, or condition is the actual problem.
Where a direct sale tends to make sense: the house needs work you cannot fund, it has been vacant and is starting to attract attention, it came to you through an estate and nobody wants it, there are tenants who will not cooperate with showings, or there is a deadline you cannot move. Six years and more than a hundred houses in, those five situations account for most of what we buy.
If You Want to Talk It Through
Call, describe the situation, and we will tell you honestly whether we are the right fit. If we are not, we will usually be able to point you toward what is. And if you want to compare the traditional route first, our walkthrough of how fast a house actually sells in Lake City lays out both paths side by side, or you can see the short version on how it works.