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Looking to sell your property fast but not sure who to trust? Complete our contact form
Critical Analysis:
When you’re selling your property, it’s of vital importance to know who you’re working with.
As with all of our reviews, you’ll find everything you need to know about House Buy Fast and whether you should trust them to sell your property quickly.
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Company
Established in
2008
Members of NAPB
Yes
Members of TPO
Yes
Registered with ICO
Yes
Approved by CTSI
No
Will “House Buy Fast” pay all of your legal fees?
Sometimes
Do they ask you to sign a contract?
Yes, always
Government verified transactions
No
Cash offer
Average sale time
21 days
Fastest sale time
7 days
Availability
8AM – 8PM (Mon-Sun)
Complaints procedure
Yes, great
Customer service
4.3 / 5
Google rating
4.8 / 5
Trustpilot rating
4.2 / 5
Reviews.co.uk rating
N / A
Feefo rating
4.7
House Buy Fast is an established UK home buyer which has been in this industry since 2008.
Being members of the TPO, and registered with the ICO, they give reasonable cash offers, and can buy your property in a few days.
4.2 / 5
(source: Companies House)
House Buy Fast is is a quick property buying company that claims to be a cash buyer.
The company was established in 2008, making it one of the first in this market.
House Buy Fast avows to provide high-quality service and work meticulously to help their customers achieve a prompt and effortless sale.
They claim to have experienced property advisor who will readily answer every query and guide you at each stage of the sales process.
Whether all of that’s true, will be revealed in this review.
When working with them, they’ll buy the property from you at a price that satisfies both parties involved, and then sell it for a profit.
You’ll get a slightly below-market price but you’ll achieve a prompt and effortless sale with little bureaucracy.
House Buy Fast provides free cash offers, they cover all costs including solicitor fee and will help you sell any property.
They can give you a no-obligation quote in just 24 hours and purchase your property in as little as 3 days.
This type of sale is perfect for people in a rush, who don’t have time for unnecessary red tape.
It’s important to remember:
You won’t get the full market value of your property but you’ll sell it very fast.
In fact, this is by far the fastest way to sell. A typical estate agent will take 6-9 months whereas a fast home-selling company can do it in mere days.
You’re sacrificing a negotiable percentage of cash for an exponential increase in speed-of-sale and a major reduction of headaches and legal complications.
Founded in 2008, House Buy Fast can buy any property in any condition.
The company claims to be one of the largest property buyers in the UK whilst still maintaining the integrity and rectitude of their family-run beginnings.
They seem to have an experienced team and they’re open every day from 8 AM – 8 PM, including weekends.
House Buy Fast appears to have no hidden charges and no legal fees.
Yes, House Buy Fast is actually a founding member of NAPB.
The National Association of Property Buyers (NAPB) was specifically set up to protect homeowners looking to sell their houses for cash to a property buying company.
The NAPB continuously screens its members in order to see whether they’re maintaining the necessary business integrity, legality, professionalism and customer service.
It’s mandatory for all NAPB members to also register with The Property Ombudsman (TPO) and abide by the TPO ‘Code Of Practice For Residential Buying Companies’.
However, being an NAPB member itself, is completely voluntary. Nobody forces these cash home buyers to become members, they do it of their own volition.
And House Buy Fast was one of the companies that started this whole initiative.
Inferring from this, we can postulate that House Buy Fast is proactive and are genuinely looking out for the interests of their customers.
Yes, House Buy Fast is a member of TPO.
The Property Ombudsman (TPO) defends the interests of the public by investigating and addressing complaints of maladministration or a violation of rights.
It has been providing consumers and property agents with an alternative dispute resolution service since 1990.
TPO has a specific category for fast home sale companies, such as House Buy Fast.
These companies have to adhere to a strict ‘Code of Practice for Residential Buying Companies’.
House Buy Fast is regulated by TPO and strictly follows the above mentioned TPO code of conduct.
This is another noteworthy feather in their cap.
Yes, House Buy Fast have been registered with the ICO since 2009.
The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is the UK’s independent regulatory body set up to uphold information rights.
The ICO also governs all forms of data collection and advertising intelligence.
By being registered with the ICO, House Buy Fast has to protect its customers’ data at all times.
The ICO also has a Free Online Checker where you can verify whether a company is registered with them or not.
House Buy Fast is registered with the ICO which further solidifies their authenticity.
House Buy Fast are fully GDPR compliant.
From our independent investigation, we discovered that HouseBuyFast.co.uk is fully GDPR compliant with the “safety of personal data collection forms”.
They don’t install marketing cookies without consent and they do not transmit data to countries outside of the EU.
They also don’t collect personal data like name, phone, location, etc. without the user’s consent.
House Buy Fast seem to be one of the most GDPR compliant companies that we’ve reviewed.
And for what it’s worth, this is a praiseworthy quality.
It’s not certain whether House Buy Fast have cash on hand because we couldn’t verify their transaction history through Companies House.
Our investigators couldn’t find House Buy Fast’s investment vehicle within Companies House and we couldn’t validate their average monthly government-verified transactions.
This could be simply due to the fact that they are using a different company name to track and register these Companies House transactions.
We find this common practice, not only in the fast home-selling market but in many other industries in the UK.
Nevertheless, in light of these findings, we cannot cannot say for certain whether House Buy Fast have or don’t have cash on hand which they use to buy properties.
In general, we’ve discovered that very few fast home-buying companies actually have disposable cash on hand.
Most of them are unregulated small businesses or worse – individual opportunists pretending to be big organisations who deliberately mislead.
These companies don’t have their own cash but attempt to raise funds by low-balling their offer and getting finance off the back of the difference between their offer and the market value.
For this reason, it’s less risky to work with home buying companies that have government verified transactions.
Yes, House Buy Fast have traded for more than 5 years.
They have been in this industry for over 13 years.
We use the ‘over/under 5 years trading time’ as a metric to gauge whether a company is an established entity with a lot of experience under their belt or just a newly founded business that may have ulterior motives.
Not all newly formed companies are scams but it’s still important to check how long they have traded.
If they’ve traded for more than 5 years, then this is a minor but still a notable vote of confidence.
And it needs to be acknowledged.
The average cash offer of House Buy Fast is 70-80% of the market value
However, House Buy Fast doesn’t have any hidden agent or conveyancing fees nor any other legal charges.
Everything is taken care of for you.
Whereas all estate agents have a myriad of legal fees which will indirectly reduce the market value of your property.
Below you can see some of the perceived benefits of using House Buy Fast instead of a generic high-street or online estate agent.
Getting 70-80% of the market value for your property when working with a fast home selling company is fair.
We’ve discovered that with sub-par home buying companies you’ll often get between 60 – 65% and sometimes even less.
Inferring from this, House Buy Fast gives reasonable offers in the context of fast home selling companies.
Of course this doesn’t mean that every home achieves that kind of valuation as it depends on a myriad of factors. Sometimes there are justifiable reasons why you may receive a lower offer.
According to the latest Statista research, the average number of days taken to sell property in UK from September 2018 to November 2020 is 65 days.
This includes selling properties via estate agents, actions, fast-sale companies and everything else under the sun.
Again, this graph represents every single method of selling a property, combined together.
And because of the vast number of fast home sale companies in the UK, this number is considerably lower than what it would’ve been if it only were estate agents and actions.
Remember when it comes to speed of sale, nothing beats a quick home buying company:
House Buy Fast‘s average sale time is 21 days but their fastest recorded sale time is only 7 days.
Remember:
With a quick home-buying company, you’re sacrificing a negotiable percentage of cash for an exponential increase in speed-of-sale and a major reduction of headaches and legal complications.
That’s why you need to carefully consider your options.
Do you want a bit more money or do you want a significantly faster sale?
Supporting a charity is by no means proof that the home buying company in question is necessarily ‘good’.
In fact, dodgy home buying companies might purposefully support and/or pretend to support a charity just to win brownie points and credibility in the eyes of the customer.
All that being said, it’s still important to acknowledge when a company cash home buyer genuinely supports a charitable cause.
We didn’t find any charitable initiatives which House Buy Fast supports.
Nevertheless, some companies prefer to donate privately or anonymously rather than stating it publicly.
We didn’t find anything that raises suspicion during our thorough research of House Buy Fast.
Our investigators sifted through all of the data and legal records of House Buy Fast and everything was clean.
However, we’ll redact this paragraph at the first glimpse of dodgy practices.
We never stop researching and our unbending commitment to excellence doesn’t waver.
This paragraph is only valid up until the ‘Last Updated’ date of this review, which can be found at the top of this page.
As far as we are aware, House Buy Fast haven’t received any additional awards or prizes.
They haven’t won any competitions either.
There’s nothing more we could add.
To assess the overall user experience (UX) of HouseBuyFast.co.uk we first analysed their website for ease of use and intuitiveness.
Just like most leading cash buying companies, House Buy Fast make it very easy to get a free quote/cash offer for your property within 24 hours or less.
Also, they have a FREEPHONE number and live chat feature which you can use to contact the company from 8 AM – 8 PM, Monday – Sunday.
We calculated their First Response Time (FTR) by messaging them at approximately 11 AM on a non-holiday weekday (on a Wednesday to be exact) and used a stopwatch to estimate how long it took them to respond.
House Buy Fast responded in 49 sec.
Which is faster than the industry average. And a fast FTR is something we consider highly important, especially in this sector.
A faster response time suggests that the home-selling company is better equipped to deal with customer queries.
And if they’re better equipped to deal with customer queries, then it means they’re investing their resources where it matters the most.
It’s rare to see a customer-centric cash home buyer and the more we research House Buy Fast, the more they appear to be such.
We also asked if they offer some sort of ‘Client Satisfaction Guarantee’, and if yes, what would that guarantee consist of.
They currently don’t offer a Client Satisfaction Guarantee but they’re happy to help resolve any issues and problems, within reason, as soon as possible.
Also, they did go out of their way and offered additional help and advice which warrants acknowledgement.
In this turbulent market, a fast home buying company should preferably have a formal complaints procedure on their website, where clients can express any disagreements, issues or just plain dissatisfaction with the overall service.
By having such a complaints procedure in place, the home buying company shows that they are willing to listen and if possible, rectify any problems that may arise.
House Buy Fast have a very good internal formal complaints procedure where you can contact their complaints resolution team via email: info@housebuyfast.co.uk.
House Buy Fast also have a separate PDF file that outlines step-by-step how their complaints procedure works. Unlike most companies where the complaints never reach the directors of the company, with House Buy Fast your complaint will be passed on to the operating director.
And because House Buy Fast is a TPO member, you can submit a complaint through The Property Ombudsman website.
Every TPO member agrees to The Property Ombudsman Code Of Practice which allows customers to file complaints against TPO members, if needed.
A legitimate quick home buying company that does what it promises shouldn’t have a problem letting you speak to their past customers.
Of course they need to have the permission of the individual involved and provide some kind of proof that it is a genuine past client of theirs.
We strongly encourage all our readers to ask to speak to a past client.
In this section, we’ll discuss what the public thinks of House Buy Fast and what online reviews the company has received.
Keep in mind that online reviews can be easily faked.
It works both ways.
The company in charge might hire fake review writers to write positive reviews.
Or on the other hand, their competitors might hire fake review writers to write negative reviews and tarnish the said company’s reputation.
Also, social media followers can be artificially inflated.
That’s why we deem this section as purely anecdotal.
Nonetheless, we use trained researchers with a sceptical eye to go through House Buy Fast’s social media presence and online reviews.
What’s not anecdotal is the Domain Rating (DR) and Search traffic (ST) metrics.
The Domain Rating is an internet metric that shows the strength of a website.
The longer a website has been online, generally the more other websites link back to it.
These are called backlinks. Backlinks are like a minor vote of confidence.
It’s rare to see a a scam website with a high Domain Rating. Why? Because other websites realise it’s a scam and they never give their “vote of confidence” to them.
The more backlinks a website has, the higher their Domain Rating will be.
For this reason, we only advise you to work with websites with a Domain Rating of 10 and up.
However, it’s still important to remember that virtually any online metric can be falsified or faked these days. Therefore, take this with a grain of salt and don’t give it much importance.
The Search Traffic is an internet metric that shows approximately how many unique visitors a given website has per month.
Also, this metric is an average evaluation over a period of several months.
Therefore, the more Search Traffic a company has, the less likely they are a scam.
Scam companies don’t have recurring visitors because once they scam someone, the victims protest and tell other people online to beware of the said scam company.
Also, scam companies appear less frequently in the top Google results because they usually have lower Domain Ratings. And Google only ranks websites with a high DR at the top.
This makes the scams unsustainable over a long period of time, and therefore, they cannot have a high Search Traffic.
The Domain Rating and Search Traffic are directly proportional. If the Domain Rating is high, then the Search Traffic will be high also, and vice versa.
All of the below stats and metrics have been taken as of the last updated date which can be found at the top of this review.
We didn’t find anything suspicious with House Buy Fast’s social media, TV and online presence, but the 1 review that they have on Trustpilot is rather questionable.
Their single Trustpilot review has been written by an account with only 1 review, which means that the person reviewing House Buy Fast created the account just to post that single review and never post another review again.
Also, House Buy Fast couldn’t retrieve the reviewer’s contact info in order to resolve the problem.
We also didn’t find anything suspicious with their domain rating and backlink profile nor their unique monthly search traffic.
House Buy Fast is an established house buying company and are also one of the founding members of the NAPB.
We thoroughly examined their strengths and weaknesses, user experience (UX), customer service and overall online presence.
House Buy Fast are also members of the TPO, and they are registered with the ICO.
They give reasonable cash offers relative to the fast home sale industry and they can buy your property in mere days.
They work 7 days a week (8 AM – 8 PM) which allows you to contact them even during the weekends if need be.
House Buy Fast are one of the very few companies that fully conform with all GDPR regulations.
We couldn’t find their government-verified transactions but that could be because they’re using a private investment vehicle. This is common practice not only in the fast home selling market but in the UK as a whole.
However, House Buy Fast have a great, structured complaints procedure and a supporting PDF file which outlines the complaints process step by step. They also have an external complaints procedure via the Property Ombudsman.
We will be continuously updating this review as we do with all of our other content. If House Buy Fast decide to alter, amend or modify something, then we’ll make sure to adjust our critique and score accordingly.
We’ve independently investigated all the UK’s top fast home buyers with our cast-iron 18 point checklist.
And by using the free Safe Connect™ programme we’ll introduce you to our most recommended & strictly vetted home buyer.
The Safe Connect™ programme was created to ensure you not only get the best possible, genuine cash offer, but also to protect you in this unregulated market.
If you click the orange button below, we’ll automatically Safe Connect you to the best property buyer in the UK – as vetted by our team of investigators. And most importantly, you’ll see exactly why we objectively classified them as the best property buyer in the UK.
If you use the Safe Connect™ programme to connect with a cash home buyer, we’ll personally hold them accountable. We’ll ensure they go the extra mile and treat you like a VIP.
The Safe Connect™ programme is a free service. There are no additional fees or costs on your end.
Safe Connect™ ensures there will be no last-minute price drops and no nasty surprises. It’s quick, easy and it eliminates all headaches.
Our strictly vetted partner will know that you’re coming through Property Sale Watchdog and they won’t dare to mess you around.
House Buy Fast is just one of the many fast home-buying companies in the UK.
In order to make sure you choose the right one, it’s best if you compare them all.
Look at their strengths & weaknesses, their pros & cons and make an informed decision.
It’s essential to know you’re in safe hands, that’s why we’re here to help.
Use our company comparison table to find a reliable and trustworthy service, and decide whether expediting the sale of your property is the right thing for you.
This review is being constantly screened by our investigator team and will be corrected in line with the emergence of new evidence.
If a company contacts us with a genuine and verifiable piece of information which supports their cause, then we’ll immediately redact the review and point to that information.
On the other hand, if we discover that a company which we’ve previously praised for a certain industry trait, starts to dabble in dodgy practices, we’ll also redact the review immediately.
We’ll point to our new findings and will adjust the table metrics and scores accordingly.
For this reason, make sure to take notice of the ‘last updated’ date at the top of this page.
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