Every cash-offer company in America will tell you that listing is slow, expensive and stressful. Every agent will tell you that cash buyers lowball. Both are describing the situation where they get paid.
The honest version is that it depends on four things, and you can work all four out in about ten minutes.
One. What the repairs actually cost
Not what you think they cost. What a contractor standing in the house says they cost, plus the fifteen percent you find once the walls are open. If that number is small relative to what the fixed-up house is worth, listing usually wins. If it is large, it usually does not.
The trap is that repairs come out of your pocket now, months before any money comes back. A lot of people who should list end up selling as-is simply because they do not have twenty thousand dollars sitting there in March.
Two. How long you actually hold it
People count market time and forget everything either side of it. The real clock runs from the day you decide to sell to the day the money hits your account. Repairs, then photos, then market time, then the option period, then the appraisal, then the lender's timeline. Three months is optimistic on a house that needs work.
Every month of that costs you the mortgage, the taxes, the insurance and the utilities. On a typical East Texas house that is somewhere north of a thousand dollars a month, and it comes straight off whatever listing was going to gain you.
Three. Whether you can keep it show-ready
This is the one nobody puts in the calculator. If you live there with three kids and a dog, or there is a tenant in it, or it is full of forty years of your mother's belongings, the listing route has a cost that does not show up in dollars.
I have watched people take a lower price specifically to not do that, and I have never once thought they were wrong.
Four. What the as-is offer actually is
Here is the useful move. Work out what you net listing it, honestly, with the repairs and the holding costs and the commission in there. Then work out what you net selling as-is. Then change the as-is number until the two match.
That number is what any cash offer has to beat to be worth taking. Everything above it is you getting paid for speed and certainty. Everything below it is you paying for those things, and now at least you know what they cost.
What I will tell you
If your house is in decent shape and you have the time and the repair money, list it. That is true even though I make more money when you do not, and I would rather tell you that once than have you find out later and decide I was the reason.
If the repair number is big, the timeline is tight, or the house is occupied and full, an as-is sale is not a lowball. It is a different product.