The Fact That Explains the Gap
Whether the parcel is in the Coastal Zone, and if it is, whether the existing house was coastally permitted.
Those two facts decide whether a buyer is working the disaster replacement exemption — same use, same building pad, within ten percent of the destroyed structure's floor area, height and bulk — or applying for a coastal development permit from scratch. One is a short predictable road. The other is not.
A buyer who has established both prices the actual project. A buyer who has assumed the exemption applies has priced the easy version of a file that may not be easy, and that number moves once they engage with Development Services.
Why Does the Permit History Matter So Much?
What We Buy
Fire-damaged residential property in San Diego and the nearer coastal communities, in any condition from smoke to bare pad. Coastal and inland. Level lots, hillsides, canyon rims and bluffs. Claims open, settled, denied and uninsured. Owner-occupied, tenanted, vacant and inherited.
Where we decline it is geography. The coastal cities beyond San Diego administer their own local coastal programmes with their own exemption provisions, and beyond the nearer communities we are the wrong buyer and will say so.
How the Number Is Built
Finished value of a house on that parcel, or the parcel's value on its capacity where that is higher, less the cost of getting there by whichever regulatory route applies, less carrying cost, less the documentary transfer tax, less margin.
Two lines make San Diego offers differ. The regulatory road, set by the coastal position and the permit history. And the capacity, set by lot area excluding environmentally sensitive lands and by whether the parcel sits in a Sustainable Development Area.
Why Do Offers Vary So Widely on the Same Property?
Where Our Interests Diverge From Yours
We are the buyer. Not an adviser, not neutral. We benefit if you accept less and decide quickly.
Everything on this site is checkable against a public source and we name them for that reason: the City's mapping for the Coastal Zone boundary, Development Services for the permit history, the assessor for the lot, the recorder for what we have actually bought. Do not take our word for any of it.
We are also not brokers, not public adjusters, not contractors, not contract assigners and not lawyers. That last one matters here, because the coastal exemption is void where the project as built does not conform to what was described, and that is a land use lawyer's territory rather than a buyer's.
When a Different Buyer Is the Right One
A developer, where the lot carries real capacity. On a parcel in a Sustainable Development Area with room for additional units, they are valuing something we are not, and they will beat us.
A coastal builder, where the structure survived. Someone who can work within the replacement threshold and knows the exemption process can pay closer to finished value than a buyer pricing a full application.
Nobody — repair it. Where the repair sits below finished value, restoring nets more. On a coastal parcel it does something else as well: it avoids the coastal application entirely and preserves whatever standing the existing building has, subject to the point that replacing fifty percent or more of a residence is treated as a replacement structure rather than repair.
Why Point Me Away From a Sale?
Reaching Us
Send an address through any form on this site. Before you deal with us, ask the questions on our page about how to tell local cash buyers apart, and read what applies on our page covering the Coastal Zone and what the lot supports.