Sell your house fast in Hartford, CT.

Hartford was built by insurance money and filled in by the people who worked for it. What that left behind is one of the most distinctive housing stocks in New England: block after block of brick and frame multifamily buildings put up between roughly 1890 and 1930, including the Perfect Six, a six unit brick building found here in numbers you will not see anywhere else. Those buildings are now well past a hundred years old, and most of what we get called about in Hartford is a direct consequence of that.

The typical single family home value in Hartford is around $280,000, up roughly 3.7% over the past year, with houses averaging about 38 days on the market.

Why Hartford sellers call us

Almost every Hartford call is about a building rather than a house. Somebody inherited a three family in Frog Hollow. Somebody has owned a Perfect Six in Barry Square since the 1980s and is finished with it. Somebody bought a two family in the South End as an investment, lost two tenants, and has been carrying it empty through a Connecticut winter.

The common thread is that these buildings are expensive to hold and hard to sell conventionally. A financed buyer needs an appraisal, and an appraiser walking a 1905 frame three family in Hartford will find plenty to write up. Meanwhile the taxes, the insurance and the heat run every month whether the units are full or not.

What a hundred year old Hartford building actually needs

The recurring list is consistent enough that we can usually predict it before we walk in. Knob and tube wiring still energised behind plaster. Galvanized supply lines closing up. Cast iron waste stacks at the end of their run. Asbestos wrapped heating pipes in the cellar. Original steam systems with radiators that work and boilers that do not. Roofs where the last layer went on over two earlier ones. Porches, and Hartford has a great many porches, where the framing has gone soft at the connection.

On a multifamily there is usually more: separate meters that were added at different times, a third floor that was converted when nobody was filing anything, and a cellar that has taken water more than once.

None of that stops us. All of it stops an FHA or VA loan, which is why these buildings sit.

Tenants, vacancies and the winter problem

A good many Hartford buildings we look at are partially occupied, and some have tenants who stopped paying. A buyer who wants to live in the property needs it delivered vacant, which means an eviction the seller has to run first, and Connecticut housing court moves at its own pace.

We buy occupied. Paying tenants, non paying tenants, month to month arrangements with nothing in writing. The occupancy transfers to us at closing and it stops being your problem.

The vacant version is its own problem. An empty building in Hartford through January is a pipe freeze waiting to happen, and vacancy insurance costs more than a normal policy if you can get it written at all. Every month a vacant building sits, the exposure grows.

Liens, back taxes and the paperwork side

Hartford has a meaningful amount of tax delinquent property and a lot of buildings carrying liens their owners inherited along with the deed. Unpaid city taxes, water and sewer balances, blight citations, and old mechanic’s liens all turn up at title search.

None of it prevents a sale to us. It gets paid out of the proceeds at closing and you see that arithmetic in writing before you agree to anything, so the number you are told is the number you walk away with.

Two Connecticut specifics worth knowing. The state and municipal conveyance tax is paid by you, the seller, not the buyer, which surprises people who have sold in New York. And Connecticut is an attorney state, so a licensed Connecticut attorney runs the closing rather than a title company. Both are normal and neither slows us down.

What we buy in Hartford

Perfect Sixes and other small apartment buildings. Two and three family frames. Single family houses in the West End, Blue Hills and Behind the Rocks. Buildings with fire damage, water damage or a failed roof. Properties with open blight citations. Estates where the heirs live out of state and nobody wants to manage a Hartford building from three hundred miles away. Buildings full of a lifetime of belongings, which we take without a box being moved.

If the building is standing and you own it, we will look at it.

The highest mill rate in Connecticut, and what it costs you to wait

This is the number that should shape any decision about holding a Hartford property. Hartford carries the highest mill rate in the state at 68.95 mills. For comparison, Hamden is second at 51.88, East Hartford is 45.9, and the Connecticut statewide average sits around 28 mills. Hartford is more than double the state average.

What that means in practice is that the cost of doing nothing is unusually high here. A vacant building in Hartford is not just sitting there quietly. It is running a tax bill at the steepest rate in Connecticut, plus vacancy insurance if you can get it written, plus heat you have to keep on through the winter so the pipes do not burst, plus whatever the building loses to weather and to people while nobody is watching it.

Owners comparing a cash offer against listing conventionally often forget to put the carrying cost on the other side of that comparison. Five or six months on the market in Hartford, on a building that is not earning, is a real number and it comes directly out of whatever the higher sale price was supposed to gain you.

That is the honest case for speed here, and it is stronger in Hartford than almost anywhere else we buy.

How to reach us

Call (516) 964-7222 or send the address through the form. We look at the property, you get a written offer within 24 hours with the reasoning shown, and it stays open for seven days. You pick the closing date. More on how we buy across Connecticut and on our how it works page.

Many Hartford homeowners also ask us how to sell a rental property as a tired landlord, sell a house with bad tenants, or sell a house with code violations.