After a Year of Rejections, This Agent Won Her Sierra Madre Home with HomeLight Cash Offer

When real estate agent Chelsea Shang and her partner, Alden Ye, had a child in 2019, they decided it was time to stop renting and buy a home of their own.

But it wasn’t going to be easy in a bustling Los Angeles market — even for an experienced agent.

“As a Realtor®, I was faced with the same challenges as my clients,” says Shang. “We were consistently facing multiple offers, bidding wars, and trying to compete with cash offers. We needed better terms to make our offers look more attractive.”

An insider tip to a competitive edge

Busy real estate agents are well-connected and always learning about new resources. This is usually a perk for clients, but when an agent becomes their own client, it’s doubly advantageous.

Through her agent partnership with HomeLight, Shang heard about HomeLight Cash Offer. Exhausted from a year of putting in one unsuccessful offer after another, she decided to give the program a try — and what better way to vet a resource for her clients than to use it herself?

“HomeLight Cash Offer turned out to be the perfect solution for us,” she says. “It instantly made our offer really attractive and gave us the ability to compete with other cash offers.”

The program works by giving qualified buyers the power of cash. HomeLight Cash Offer eliminates financing contingencies and allows for a fast closing — even in as few as eight days — which means that buyers and their agents can submit an ultra-competitive purchase offer and stand out from the crowd.

“We chose to use HomeLight Cash Offer because we were in the market for a very long time, and we’d been putting in so many offers and really coming close,” explains Ye. “I think the multiple times is what really hurt — when we were purchasing with a loan, we found ourselves getting really close so many times and then losing to somebody who, in certain circumstances, even had offers below ours.

“HomeLight Cash Offer gave us the opportunity to be more competitive.”

Shang and Ye both appreciated the ease of working with HomeLight experts.

“The team at HomeLight was great,” says Shang. “Everybody involved was very efficient and quick, and communication was strong. All our questions were answered right off the bat.”

HomeLight’s speed made it possible to compete and win

When competing for a home in a seller’s market, speed is key. HomeLight Cash Offer gave Shang and Ye the speed they needed to compete with — and ultimately beat — the competition.

“We saw this house on the market really late,” says Ye. “We had a really short timeframe after viewing the house, and everybody on the HomeLight team was fast and efficient. I think it only took about 24 hours from when we saw the home to getting everything put together — all our financials, the underwriting, the appraisal, and really helping us submit that offer.”

Shang and Ye’s cash offer on their dream home was one of ten offers, and theirs wasn’t the highest — but it did prove to be the strongest.

“The sellers were relocating to the east coast, so they were ultimately looking for a quick, easy transaction with the least amount of risk,” says Shang. “They really valued the timing and guarantee of our cash offer, and the sellers decided to only counter our offer to match the highest bidder — instead of issuing a multiple counteroffer to all the offers on the table.

“This made our decision really easy and took out all the stress from a potential bidding war.”

Thanks to HomeLight Cash Offer, Shang and Ye were finally successful in purchasing their preferred home.

“We’d been putting in offers for a year, and our first offer with HomeLight Cash Offer got accepted — we were super excited about that,” says Ye.

Cash Offer: Tested, approved, and recommended

It’s safe to say that Shang’s test run with HomeLight Cash Offer was a success, and she is happy to recommend the program to her clients.

“After my experience, I highly recommend HomeLight Cash Offer to all of my buyers in the market.

So far, I’ve closed five other buyers with this program and everyone had a great experience. We’ve even saved buyers money, because a lot of times you don’t have to be the highest number to win the home. What you need are the cash and the quick close.”

And HomeLight Cash Offer delivers both.

Header Image Source: (Matt Gush / Shutterstock)