The best cash buyers are people who have already bought for cash near your deal. Find them in recorded sales where no mortgage was filed, then add referrals from hard-money lenders, property managers, title companies and landlords. Verify every buyer with proof of funds you can confirm and closings you can see in county records.
Educational only. This explains how these situations generally work. It is not legal, tax or financial advice, and the rules differ by state — talk to an attorney or CPA about your own situation before you act on any of it.
A list of 8,000 phone numbers that produces no closings is worth less than 25 people who each bought two houses in your county last year. Most wholesalers who say they “have no buyers” actually have plenty of contacts and no idea which ones close. Everything below is about finding the second group and ignoring the noise.
A useful working definition: a cash buyer is someone who has closed a purchase without a traditional mortgage in your area within the last 12 months, or who can show you funds you can verify today. Anyone else is a prospect, and belongs in a lower tier of your list.
Every sale is recorded with the county. When a deed is recorded with no new mortgage behind it, the buyer most likely paid cash or used private money that was not recorded. That is the single best signal you can get, because it is behavior, not a claim.
You can pull this from county recorder and assessor records directly, or from a data provider that aggregates them. Either way, the filter is the same: sales in the last 12 months, in the ZIP codes where you wholesale, with no purchase mortgage recorded, where the buyer is not living in the property (tax bill mailed elsewhere, or the buyer is an LLC or trust).
Here is what a typical pull looks like, as an illustration. Your numbers will differ by market.
| Filter step | Records left |
|---|---|
| All recorded sales, 3 ZIP codes, last 12 months | 1,400 |
| No purchase mortgage recorded | 310 |
| Buyer is an entity or does not live there | 180 |
| After merging LLCs with the same mailing address | 95 unique buyers |
| Bought 2 or more properties in the period | 40 |
Those 40 are your tier 1 prospects before you have made a single call. The step most people skip is the merge. Active investors often buy each house in a different LLC, so one person can look like six small buyers. Grouping by the tax-bill mailing address, or by the registered agent and manager on the state's business-entity search, collapses them into one decision-maker who buys six houses a year — which is the person you want on the phone.
Look at what they bought, too. If a buyer's purchases are all three-bedroom ranches between $90,000 and $140,000 that later resold renovated, you know their buy box without asking. If the houses show up as rentals a few months later, you are dealing with a landlord, who will care about rent and taxes more than resale comps.
Short-term lenders fund the same fix-and-flip investors you want to sell to, and they want more loans. Call local hard-money lenders, explain that you send off-market deals, and ask whether they would share your deals with their borrowers or introduce you to active ones. Many will, because your deal becomes their next loan.
A bonus: a buyer who is pre-approved with a lender that already knows the property type closes with fewer surprises. When you qualify a buyer later, ask which lender they use and whether they have closed with that lender before.
Property managers work for the buy-and-hold investors who buy houses in working-class neighborhoods for rent. Their clients ask them to watch for deals. A short call — “I send off-market rentals in these ZIP codes, would your owners want to see them?” — often gets you forwarded to investors who never appear on public cash-buyer lists because they buy only a few houses a year.
For landlords directly, pull absentee owners with three or more properties in your market from the same county data. Local landlord associations and real estate investor meetups are the other place they gather. Landlords are slower to decide than flippers, but they will often pay more for a house that is already rented or nearly rent-ready.
The title company or closing attorney that handles investor deals in your market sees who closes, every week. They will not hand you a client list — nor should they — but once you bring them files, they will often make introductions, and they will tell you which buyers show up with funds on time and which ones do not. That second piece of information is worth more than a hundred names.
The way in is simple: open your contracts with one investor-friendly title company, be organized, and close. If your file handling is what slows you down, our transaction coordination team handles the paperwork side so title sees a clean file every time.
Co-wholesaling, where two wholesalers split a fee because one has the contract and the other has the buyer, is common. Do it with a written agreement that says who is paid what, and check your state's disclosure and licensing rules before marketing someone else's contract; our guide on whether wholesaling is legal explains why co-wholesaling draws more scrutiny. You can also send deals straight to principal buyers who publish what they buy; that is exactly what our submit-a-deal form is for.
Educational only — talk to a real estate attorney in your state before you rely on this.
Qualifying is where a buyer list becomes a closing list. Ask for these before you sign an assignment:
| Ask for | What it proves | How to check it |
|---|---|---|
| Proof of funds in the buyer's name or entity | Money exists today | Confirm the bank is real on FDIC BankFind (credit unions are on NCUA's locator), then call the bank at the number listed there, not the one on the letter |
| Two or three recent purchase addresses | They actually close | Look them up in county records and match the buyer name or entity |
| Their buy box | Your deal fits them | ZIP codes, price range, rehab level, rental or resale |
| Their title company and lender | Closing will not stall | A known title company and a lender they have used before |
On proof of funds: a PDF bank letter is easy to fake. The FDIC's BankFind Suite lets you confirm the institution exists and find its real contact details. A bank will not usually confirm a customer's balance to you, but a buyer who resists any verification tells you what you need to know.
Recent closes matter more than funds. A buyer with $200,000 in the bank and no purchases in two years is a tire-kicker with savings. A buyer with $60,000 in the bank who closed four deals last year using a lender is a real buyer. And if a deal sits unsold even with a verified list, the list is rarely the only problem; see why your wholesale deal isn't selling.
Tag every buyer by ZIP codes, price range, rehab tolerance, rental or resale, and last closed date. Then send each deal only to the buyers it fits. A buyer who gets ten deals a week that do not match their box stops opening your messages, including the eleventh one that does.
Every 90 days, move buyers who have not replied or closed down a tier. Promote anyone who closed. Follow the consent rules for texting and calling in your state and under federal law; unsolicited text blasts are a fast way to get your number blocked or worse.
Protect the money side too. Never send wire or deposit instructions by email alone. Real estate transactions are a named target of business email compromise — reported real-estate BEC losses reached $446.1 million in 2022, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center, and a single spoofed email can send a buyer's earnest money to a criminal. Tell buyers to call the title company at a known number before they wire.
Once you have 20 to 40 verified buyers, the rest of the dispo process gets much easier; our guide on how to dispo a wholesale deal fast shows how to use those tiers in a 72-hour window.
Restar Acquisitions is a family-owned principal buyer of single-family homes. We buy in our own name, for cash and on creative terms, in the markets on our Where-we-buy page. Vet us the way you would vet any buyer: see who we are on our about page and ask us what you would ask anyone else. Trevor McAmis personally underwrites every deal.
Our buy box is published. A deal fits when contract price plus repairs is at or under 78% of ARV, and we look closely up to 85%. Above that, we still review it and tell you the price that would work. When you submit a deal, the form shows that verdict live, and we reply the same business day.
What we will not do: buy outside our markets, make a sight-unseen promise we cannot keep, or pay more than the numbers support. If we pass, we tell you why, which also tells you how the rest of your buyers are likely to see it.
We publish our buy box and reply the same business day. Send us a deal.
All wholesaler services · Submit a deal · Markets we buy in · About Restar
Keep reading: What Is Dispo in Real Estate? The Wholesale Dispositions Guide · How to Dispo a Wholesale Deal Fast · Selling a Wholesale Contract to a Direct Buyer vs. a Buyer List
