Sell a Fire Damaged House in Orlando
We Buy Fire Damaged Houses In Orlando.
In Orlando, selling a fire damaged house for cash is straightforward compared with most of Florida — Orange County land values are high enough that a burned structure still has something real underneath it. What isn't straightforward is getting anyone in this industry to call you back. We closed in Apopka, twenty minutes up the 441, and the intake record that sits behind this page is a man who filled in four of
our forms in three days because nobody had picked up.
If you need to sell your fire damaged house in the I-4 corridor, the constraint is rarely the price. It's who actually answers, and whether they can close.
5.0 stars from 26 reviews. BBB Accredited. A+ rating. We pay all closing costs.
Fire Damaged Home in Orlando? Get a Fair Offer Today
Request a cash offer from Fire Cash Buyer and we'll give you a call to scheduled when we can walk it. Then give you an offer in 24 hours
Contact Us
He Needed To Sell His Fire Damaged House. Nobody Called Him Back.
An Orange County owner reached us in June. Then again the next day. Then twice more.
Four submissions. Four different websites of ours. Three days.
His details barely changed. Three bed, two bath, owned since 1998, no mortgage. Fire on the 11th of March, started by an outside pool pump. Partial damage, a handful of rooms, no demolition order, neighbours untouched. Claim filed. He wanted $150,000, firm, and his reason for selling ran to four words: he needed money.
The only thing that shifted between submissions was the address. Two of the four listed a different street.
We publish this because it's the most honest thing in our Orlando file. A man with a straightforward, sellable house spent three days trying to get anyone to pick up the phone. That's what this market looks like from where you're sitting, and it's why the first promise on this page is about response time rather than dollars.
Companies That Buy Fire Damaged Houses In Orange County, And How They Differ
Four kinds, and they are not interchangeable.
Specialists
Firms that only buy fire. We price fire repair every day, so the number survives the inspection.
General "we buy houses" operators
They take a fire deal occasionally, guess wrong on smoke and structural heat damage, then reduce the offer or disappear. If the website never says the word fire, this is what you've found.
Wholesalers
They tie your house up under contract and sell the contract to somebody else. Ask directly whether the person in front of you is the one wiring the money.
Retail buyers and small builders
Real, but rare, and usually dependent on financing a burned house can't satisfy. FHA and conventional loans require a safe, habitable property, so most of these offers collapse at the lender.
What Happens On The First Call
Five questions. About ten minutes.
What burned, and how much. Rooms, or the whole structure.
Where the claim stands. Filed, paid, denied, or never opened.
Whether anything official has arrived. A notice, an order, a code case.
Who is on the deed. Heirs, a trust, an ex-spouse, a life estate.
What you actually want. Some people want out. Some want the house back
We don't ask for your Social Security number, a fee, or an exclusive agreement to talk to us. If anybody in this business wants money before closing, end the call
Selling A Fire Damaged House In The I-4 Lightning Corridor
Orange, Lake and Osceola have handed us a pattern that shows up nowhere else in our national records.
A generator exploded. Lake County, July. Severe damage. The owner told us he couldn't sleep for reliving it.
Lightning. Osceola County, May, a direct strike. Claim filed, asking $200,000.
A candle. Osceola again, August, on an investment property.
A pool pump, as above.
Read that list again. A generator sits in a Florida garage because of hurricane season. A pool pump runs nine months a year. Lightning is not unusual between here and Tampa — two of the three lightning-caused fires in our entire national database are Florida, and both are in this corridor.
Fires here come out of the equipment that makes a house liveable in this state. That matters to your claim, because cause of loss is the first thing an adjuster decides and it governs everything after it.
What An Orlando Offer Is Built From
Four numbers, and we show you all four.
What the house is worth repaired, based on what's actually selling near it
What our contractor says the repair costs, in writing
What it costs to carry the property while that work happens
What's owed against it — mortgage, taxes, liens, open code cases
Subtract the middle three from the first. That's the offer. There is no fifth number where we decide how desperate you sound.
Where the seller names a figure first, we land at a median of 88% of the asking price.
Based on 19 sales. Figure as of Q3 2026. Ask us for the current number.
If the result is lower than you hoped, we show you why. And if the arithmetic says you're better off rebuilding, that's what we'll tell you — we close about one in seven of the properties we get into a real conversation about, and a good share of the other six are people we talked out of selling.
What To Ask Before You Sell: Orange County And Your City
We don't print permit costs or ordinance names on this page. They differ between the county and each city inside it, and they're amended. Here's who holds your answer.
- First, establish which authority covers your address. Apopka, Winter Park, Maitland, Ocoee and the City of Orlando each run their own permitting; an unincorporated Orange County address goes to the county. Three of our Orange County intake records were Apopka addresses, so this is not academic. Then ask that building department: which office issues a residential demolition permit for this address and what does it cost; is an asbestos survey or notification required first; and is there an open permit on this parcel from a restoration that stopped, and what closes it out.
- Code enforcement, same jurisdiction. Ask whether an unsafe structure case is open, what the notice period is, whether fines accrue daily, and whether they attach as a lien that must clear at closing.
- Your electric utility. Orlando Utilities Commission serves the city and parts of the county; Duke Energy Florida serves much of the rest. Ask what they require before restoring service after a fire, and whether a passed electrical inspection comes first.
- The Orange County Property Appraiser. If the house stood uninhabitable for 30 days or more, section 197.319 of the Florida Statutes may refund part of that year's property tax. Ask them whether your fire qualifies, request form DR-465, and note the deadline is March 1 of the year after the fire.
- The Orange County floodplain administrator. Ask whether the parcel sits in a Special Flood Hazard Area, who determines substantial damage, and what building value they measure repair costs against. High repair costs in a flood zone can force compliance work on the whole structure rather than just the burned part — ask this before you commit to a rebuild, not after.
Get every one of those in writing, with a name and a date on it.
When The Deed Is Complicated
Orange and Osceola send us more ownership tangles than most places: inherited property, out-of-state heirs, homes bought decades ago and never retitled, investment properties held by partners who disagree.
None of it stops a sale. It changes the timeline. We've closed through probate, through international signatures executed at a US embassy, and through a mortgage paid off thirty years earlier at a bank that no longer exists. Bring us the mess. It's the part of the job we're actually good at.
Half the people who contact us here own nothing
Half the Orlando-area households in our records never wanted an offer.
One had been out of her home for 75 days. The hotel money had run out. She needed low-cost housing and help with utilities, and she needed two bedrooms because her 81-year-old mother uses a wheelchair and a walker.
Another had been without stable housing for 357 days after an apartment fire, waiting on a benefits hearing, with a landlord who had done nothing.
Neither owns a building we could buy, and we won't pretend otherwise. We answered both anyway. If that's you, skip our form entirely housefiresolutions.com is free and nobody there is trying to buy anything from you.
How To Check An Orlando Fire Buyer
Three of our reviewers said, unprompted, that they'd been afraid of being scammed. Given who circles a fire victim in the first fortnight, that's a healthy instinct
Ask how many fire damaged houses they've bought and where. Ours: 798 worked across 38 states, 6 bought in Florida. Ask for the cities by name.
Ask for proof of funds before you sign anything.
Ask which jurisdiction issues a demolition permit for your address. If they don't know Apopka isn't the county, they haven't closed here.
Ask whether they're buying or reselling your contract. We buy.
Questions Orlando Owners Ask
My claim is still open. Can I sell now?
Usually yes — the claim and the sale run on separate tracks. Whether the settlement follows you or the building depends on your policy wording and your lender, so
confirm that in writing before you rely on it.
A pool pump started my fire. Is that covered?
Electrical and mechanical causes are usually covered, but it's the category insurers scrutinise hardest, because if the fault traces to an installer or a
manufacturer they want to recover from them. Expect an investigation, and keep every invoice for the equipment.
My fire was undetermined. Does that hurt me?
It can slow a claim considerably. It doesn't affect what we'll pay, because we're pricing the building, not the cause.
Can I sell an investment property that burned?
Yes. One of our Osceola records is exactly that. If you claimed the loss, ask your CPA about a Section 1033 exchange — a fire is an involuntary conversion and the rules differ from a 1031.
Nobody has called me back and I've submitted to several companies.
That's the most common message in our Orlando file. Send the address here and a person will ring you, usually within a day.
Do I have to be in Florida to sell?
No. About half the properties we assess, we assess without the owner present.
Does this page apply in Kissimmee, Sanford or Sorrento?
The state law does. The permitting and utility answers don't — Osceola, Seminole and Lake are separate counties with their own offices.
Fire Cash Buyer
Purchases fire damaged property throughout Cook County and in 37 other states. 798 properties worked. 26 reviews, 5.0 stars. BBB Accredited, A+.
Fire Damaged Home in Orlando? Get a Fair Offer Today
Request a cash offer from Fire Cash Buyer and we'll give you a call to scheduled when we can walk it. Then give you an offer in 24 hours