Last updated: June 2026 | By Drew Heberer
People keep asking me why a guy who buys houses here in the Midwest is now spending a chunk of his time in San Diego, so I figured I would just write it out instead of explaining it one phone call at a time.
The short version is that the work is the same work. A homeowner has a house they need to sell, and for one reason or another the normal route does not fit. List it with an agent, stage it, do the repairs, sit through the showings, and then wait and hope the buyer’s loan actually clears. That route is fine when you have a clean house and time to spare. It is a bad fit when you inherited a place three states away, or it needs more work than you want to sink into it, or you simply have to be done by a hard date and cannot roll the dice on a 45 day escrow that might fall apart at day 40. That problem looks exactly the same in San Diego as it does in Des Moines. The only things that really change are the price tags and the coastal rules.
What actually surprised me about San Diego
You picture California and you picture new and shiny. The reality is that a huge number of San Diego homes are original 1950s and 60s builds that have not been seriously touched in decades. Add to that the coastal zone, which covers a big slice of the desirable neighborhoods, and remodeling can mean coastal permits that take months and scare off the average retail buyer who wanted something move in ready.
So you end up with this odd gap. You have a house worth a lot of money on paper, sitting in a market everyone calls red hot, that almost nobody actually wants to buy in its current shape, because the next owner does not want to deal with the work or the permitting or the unknowns. The sellers in that spot are stuck. An agent tells them to put 60,000 dollars into the place to make it show, they do not have 60,000 dollars or the months it takes, and the as is listing just sits there collecting lowball offers anyway.
That gap is the exact thing I have spent years working in back here in Iowa, just with palm trees and bigger numbers. So it made sense to go where the houses are.
How the San Diego side actually runs
I put a real team on the ground out there rather than trying to run it from a laptop in the Midwest. The crew runs offers the same way I run everything, which is the only way I know how to do it and still sleep fine.
We start with what the home would actually sell for fixed up and on the open market, based on real comparable sales right in that neighborhood. From there we subtract the honest cost of the repairs the place needs, the cost of carrying and reselling it, and a margin that lets us take the risk and still run this as a business. What is left is the cash offer, and we show you the comps and the repair number so the figure is not a mystery you are supposed to just trust.
And here is the part that matters most to me. If we run that math and decide listing the home would put more money in your pocket than our cash offer would, we tell you that, and we tell you why. I would rather lose a deal by being straight with someone than win one by talking them into the wrong move. You can see how all of that works on our San Diego cash home buying page, where we lay out the offer math and the kinds of situations we buy in.
The handful of things that are genuinely different out there
For anyone reading this who owns California property or is thinking about it, here are the differences that actually matter, not the tourist stuff.
Price spreads are wider. When a Des Moines house worth 250,000 gets three cash offers, the spread between the high and low might be 25,000 dollars. On a San Diego house worth 1.1 million, that same percentage spread is well into six figures. Which means getting more than one number before you sign matters even more out there, not less.
Property tax does not work the way most transplants expect. California’s Prop 13 locks the assessed value low for long time owners, and Prop 19 changed how that low tax basis carries to heirs. If you inherited a place expecting to keep grandma’s tax bill, that may not be how it plays out anymore, and at California values the difference is real money. Worth a fifteen minute call with a CPA before you assume anything.
The coastal zone is its own animal. Homes near the water can carry permitting questions on any future remodel, which is exactly why so many older coastal homes sit. We are comfortable buying into that and pricing the reality in, instead of walking away from it like a retail buyer would.
Same playbook, new coast
That is really the whole story. Same problem, same honest math, same refusal to lowball someone and pretend it is a favor, just in a market with a lot more zeros and a lot of old houses that need somebody willing to take them as they are.
If you have a San Diego house you need to move, or honestly if you have family out there sitting on one they do not know what to do with, the team is reachable at San Diego Cash Home Offer, sandiegocashhomeoffer.com. They will give you a fair cash number, an honest read on whether listing would net you more, and zero pressure either way.
I will keep posting what I learn out there, because a surprising amount of it ends up applying right back here in Iowa too.