We Buy Houses in Union County, NJ

Union County is where the industrial towns along the turnpike and the railroad meet the commuter suburbs, and the houses we buy sit on the industrial side of that line. The two and three family frames of Elizabeth, the capes and colonials of Linden, Roselle, and Hillside built for the refinery and factory workers, the old Victorians of Rahway and Plainfield cut into apartments decades ago. The families who bought them from the 1960s and 1970s on, Italian and Polish first, then Black, Haitian, Colombian, Portuguese, and Salvadoran, are now passing them to children who live somewhere else.

Union County tax rates are among the highest in New Jersey against modest values, which means a few missed quarters become tax sale certificates fast, and Plainfield, Elizabeth, Hillside, and Roselle produce a steady stream of certificate foreclosures. Add an oil tank the family forgot, a basement unit the city has cited, and a tenant who stopped paying, and a financed buyer walks. We have been buying in Union County since 2000, we buy with cash, and every one of those problems is a line item in our offer instead of a reason the deal dies.

What we see most in Union County

Tax sale certificates and lien foreclosures. We buy houses carrying certificates, redeem them from the proceeds at closing, and can close before a certificate foreclosure reaches judgment. Our guide to selling with tax liens covers the deadlines.

Estates with oil tanks. Linden, Roselle, and Hillside capes from the 1950s almost all had oil heat, and lenders will not close until a tank is pulled and tested. We buy with the tank as it is, unknown soil and all. See selling an inherited house.

Carved up Victorians. Rahway and Plainfield have old houses with three or six units and a certificate of occupancy for one. We price the house on its actual rent roll and legal status and handle the city after closing. See selling a house with code violations.

Where we buy in Union County

Every town below has its own page with the housing stock, the situations we see there, current home values, and answers to the questions sellers in that town ask most. Union Township, Cranford, and Roselle Park pages are coming. If your town is not listed yet, call anyway. We buy across the whole county, and if you need to sell your house fast for cash we can have a written offer to you within 24 hours.

Industrial ground, and the questions it raises at closing

Union County’s spine is industrial and always has been. Elizabeth’s port and the corridor running through Linden and Rahway put housing right up against working industrial land for a century, and some of that land has a documented history.

For a homeowner this surfaces in two ways. Older houses in this part of the county frequently had oil heat, and the tank was often buried in the yard and simply abandoned in place when the house converted to gas. A tank sweep finds them, and a financed buyer’s lender then wants it located, tested, removed, or all three before it will fund. Separately, a cautious lender or a careful buyer’s attorney occasionally asks questions about a parcel’s industrial neighbours that an owner has no way to answer.

We buy with tanks in the ground, tested or untested, and with whatever the parcel history turns out to be. It becomes a line in our offer that we show you, rather than a condition you have to clear before anyone will make one.

Elizabeth and Plainfield are not the same sale

Elizabeth is dense, largely multifamily, and heavily tenanted. Plainfield has large Victorians on real lots, many of them carved into units decades ago and some of them in historic districts. Linden and Rahway sit between the two. The right answer about how to sell is genuinely different in each.

The Victorians are the ones people most often get wrong. A big old house that needs a roof, a heating system and electrical work can be worth restoring and can also be worth well under what the owner has been told, and the difference usually comes down to how much original fabric survives and whether the conversion to apartments was ever permitted. We will tell you which one you have.

Lead paint certificates on Union County rentals

Under P.L. 2021 c.182, in force since July 2022, pre-1978 rental dwellings in New Jersey require lead paint hazard inspection every three years or on tenant turnover, with a lead safe certificate valid for two years. That covers most of the rental housing in Elizabeth, Hillside, Roselle and Plainfield.

We buy occupied, with or without a certificate, and we do not ask you to run an inspection first so that we can make an offer.

The certificate of continued occupancy, town by town

New Jersey has no statewide resale certificate of occupancy. Your municipality sets the rule, most towns in the county have one, and the seller normally arranges and pays for the inspection.

On a house that has been in one family for forty years the inspection commonly turns up a finished basement nobody filed, an enclosed porch that never appeared on a survey, or detector placement that has been superseded twice. Curing the list before closing is the seller’s problem in a retail sale. In ours it is not. We close and handle it afterward.

What Union County houses are selling for right now

Typical single family home values and days on market by town, from public Zillow and Realtor.com data, refreshed monthly. Condition drives everything: a house that needs work trades well below these numbers on the open market, which is exactly the gap our cash offers are built for.

Compare every town we buy in, all three states, on the home values by town tracker, updated monthly.