The estate agent who talks about achieving the best price, as if you have unlimited time, while your life burns money in the background and the chain misbehaves.

This is not really a debate about speed. A cash house buyer can complete in weeks. An estate agent sale often takes months. The question is what that speed premium actually costs once you do the maths, and what waiting quietly steals from you while everyone promises it will be worth it.

Start with a clean example. Your house is worth £250,000 on the open market. A cash house buyer offers 80 percent. That is £200,000. You feel the missing £50,000 immediately. Now price the wait you need to earn it.

If you sell through an estate agent you pay the commission, usually around 1 to 3 percent plus VAT. At 1.5 percent plus VAT you are near £4,500 on £250,000. Add conveyancing, an EPC, and the usual presentation spending that somehow becomes necessary the moment you list. A modest £1,500 legal bill, £100 EPC, £200 photos, £3,000 on fixes and tidying and you have burned roughly £9,000 before you even reach completion. That is before the real leak starts.

Holding costs are the quiet tax of waiting. A £200,000 mortgage at 5 percent costs about £833 a month in interest alone. If you are at £250,000, you are just over £1,000 a month. Add council tax, utilities, insurance, and maybe service charges. Call it £1,500 a month in round numbers, often more on an empty property. Four months to completion is £6,000. Six months is £9,000. If your buyer wobbles, you pay twice.

And they do wobble. Rightmove has previously reported around a third of agreed sales fall through before completion. When an estate agent tells you they have a buyer, what they often mean is they have a person with a mortgage application and big feelings. That is not the same as money.

Certainty is what the cash house buyer sells you. No chain. No lender. No fragile survey drama. A completion date that stays put. That certainty has value, because your alternative is a slow, expensive lottery where you pay the ticket price every month.

So compare net outcomes, not headline prices. £250,000 via an estate agent, minus £4,500 fees, minus £9,000 of six months holding and basics, minus £3,000 to £10,000 of delay and deal failure risk, starts to look a lot like the cash house buyer offer you dismissed as cheeky. Except with the cash route you have your money now, not after another round of viewings and optimism.

Do you want the highest theoretical price, or the highest reliable number that lands in your account on a date you can actually plan around? How much does one more month cost you, and how many months are you prepared to buy for a maybe?