We Buy Houses in Kelso, WA, for Cash

Nothing, at any stage. The call is free, the walkthrough is free, the written offer is free, and nothing is held back on our side at closing, so the figure you read is the figure you get. You are not signing anything to find out what it is. Plenty of people take our number, sit with it for a few weeks and go a different way, and as far as we are concerned that is a fine outcome.

Sell it as-is for cash rather than putting it on the market. The sequence runs like this: you call (253) 254-6366 or send the address over, somebody comes and walks the house one time, and the offer arrives in writing before the next day is out. Accept it and a licensed Cowlitz County title and escrow company opens escrow on the day you choose, which can be seven days away. You repair nothing, clean nothing, and pay neither commission nor fee.

Sometimes, and we will tell you when we think so. A Kelso house that shows well, with a couple of months to spare, will usually do better on the open market: over the three months to August 2026 Redfin had houses here going under contract in about 24 days at roughly 1% under asking, and an agent earns their commission in a market like that. What shifts the comparison is a repair bill you cannot fund or a date you did not choose, because a listed sale is agreed on one day and paid on another, with the inspection, the appraisal and the buyer's lender sitting in between.

It is a number for houses like yours, averaged over a much wider area than your street. Kelso and the larger city two miles west of it get treated as one market by almost anything that prices a house from a distance: the comparable sales get pulled in a radius that crosses the Cowlitz River, and one figure comes back covering both sides of it. That blend can land above what your house is worth or below it, and the figure gives you no way to tell which. Ours starts from Kelso closings and from half an hour spent inside your house, and if the number you were quoted looks generous to us, you will hear that too.

Kelso itself, on both sides of the freeway and up the hill. We are the buyer from start to finish: it is our money, and our name that ends up on the deed. Brandon Phillips owns We Buy PNW Homes, he grew up in southwest Washington, and he makes the two hour run down I-5 to look at your house, settle on the number and sign the paperwork. Anything you tell us goes nowhere else; it exists to work out your figure and for nothing beyond that. Settlement itself runs through a licensed Cowlitz County title and escrow company, the neutral party that takes in the money and gets the deed recorded.

Four lines, set out in full further up this page. We start from what the house would be worth once the work is done, judged against recent Kelso sales on comparable streets, then subtract the repairs itemized at what our contractors charge in Cowlitz County this year, then what it costs us to hold and resell the place, then a margin of 10 to 15%. At a $360,000 median the repair line is what moves the total most, which is why you get it broken out rather than folded into one figure. Your situation does not change the arithmetic: somebody in a hurry gets the same number as somebody who is not.

Yes, and the longer the repair list the more sense a cash sale usually makes. The work comes off our side of the arithmetic, itemized, instead of turning into a list of jobs for you. On the east Kelso hillside the city can require a geotechnical assessment before it permits regulated work on ground mapped as a landslide hazard, which is a real wait and a real bill for an owner and simply a line in our budget. You can see how your own parcel is mapped on the state's geologic information portal. Fire damage, hoarding and a house nobody has cleared out are ordinary here, not disqualifying.

Usually not. Washington works a trustee sale to a fixed statutory schedule, and the state's Foreclosure Fairness Program can bring your loan servicer to a table with a mediator, but only if you ask while that schedule is still running. That makes the dates printed on the notice the first thing worth reading closely. Unpaid property taxes follow a separate path entirely, through the Cowlitz County Treasurer, an office that sits here in Kelso and that did put tax foreclosed parcels up at auction as recently as December 2025. Get a payoff figure out of your servicer, then talk to us: with equity in the house, a 7 day close can settle both debts and hand you whatever is left over.

With the court, and in Kelso that is a short errand rather than a drive out of town. Cowlitz County probate is filed with the Clerk of Superior Court downtown, which holds the permanent record for the whole county, and Washington Courts publishes the forms and the self-help material if the estate turns out to be straightforward. We can have an offer sitting ready while the court does its part, and the house does not need emptying, cleaning or dividing up first.

Neither one. A lease stays with the property, so nobody has to be moved out beforehand: your tenant receives the written notice Washington asks for before anyone walks through, and the deposit and the balance of the term come across to us on closing day. Recorded debts are much the same story. Back taxes, a contractor claim, a second mortgage, a diking district assessment on a valley floor parcel: escrow settles them out of the sale proceeds, and we order the title work early enough that nothing turns up unexpectedly in week two. Your own parcel record is public, at the Cowlitz County Assessor.

They stay, and they become ours. We take the house exactly as it stands, so nothing has to be hauled out, sorted or donated before closing: the range and the fridge, the chest freezer in the garage, forty years of boxes in a hillside crawlspace, a shed at the back of a West Kelso lot that nobody has opened in a decade. Take whatever matters to you, the photographs and the paperwork and anything with a name on it, and shut the door on the rest. We arrange the clear-out afterwards and we pay for it.