system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:Those "We buy houses" signs on street lamps do they actually buy your home or is it all a scam?
gpt
Suppose your uncle just died, and you inherited his house. Great, right? (I mean, sad about your uncle, but great about the house.) But when you go over to look at your new house, it's in terrible condition. The roof leaked, and then water got in and the ceiling in one of the bedrooms collapsed, the kitchen countertops are missing, there's trash everywhere, and the raccoon who lives in the upstairs closet chased you outside and is still standing in the doorway hissing at you.

You're not a builder- you don't know how to fix the house yourself. And you can't get a loan to hire someone else to fix the house- banks won't usually write a mortgage unless there's a basically-inhabitable house to borrow against. And when you had a realtor out to talk about listing it for sale, he yelled at you for wasting his time, then peeled out leaving a cloud of rubber smoke.

Right when you're thinking maybe we should just let the raccoon keep the house, you drive past a We BUY Houses: CASH sign. You call the number, and someone from their office says, "308 10th St.... uh, hang on, let me look that up on the GIS... yeah, we'll give you $40,000 for that- we just need to run a title search to make sure you're the real owner and can legally sell it. What's that? Bad condition? Yeah, we can deal with that, it's all factored into the price."

That offer is kind of predatory- sure, the house needs sixty thousand dollars in repairs, but afterwards, it'll probably sell for $150k. But what else can you do? You can't afford you fix it yourself, and you don't have anyone else who wants to buy it. If you do nothing, the house will keep on decaying, and either you'll keep paying taxes on it or the city will seize it. You might as well get a payout now, even if it's not quite what the house is worth.