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If you own a home these days you’re increasingly lucky in a lot of ways. If you bought before the recent interest rate hikes, you’re probably sitting on a nice, low rate that makes current buyers seethe with jealousy. And considering that there’s a lack of available homes to buy (the housing deficit in the U.S. is estimated to remain between 1-2 million for the foreseeable future), your property is worth more and more every day.
This explains a common experience among homeowners: The unsolicited call, text, or piece of mail offering to buy your house even though it isn’t listed for sale. A lot of homeowners are surprised when these start rolling in, because they assume you have to officially list your house to sell it—but of course you can sell your home at any time, to anyone, for any price (well, your lender might have something to say about the price, but as long as you can pay off your mortgage you can do what you want).
If you have no plans to sell your home but the convenience of a buyer just showing up and handing you a bag of cash for the place is appealing, however, you should think twice: There are three big reasons you should never respond to an unsolicited offer on your house.
Reason number one to ignore unsolicited real estate offers: They might be scams. Pretty much any time someone contacts you with an offer that seems too easy or too profitable to be true, it is. A few ways scammers utilize cold calling like this include:
Up-front fees. They’ll tell you that they have a nice cash offer on your house, but you have to pay some administrative fees to get the ball rolling. No legitimate real estate professional will ask you for an up-front fee.
Bank details. Some scammers are in it for your bank details, which they tell you they need in order to do a wire transfer. Instead, of course, they use the information to drain your accounts.
Title. Sometimes the scammers lure you in with a “cash offer” that turns out to be an offer to sell your house on your behalf—and then they ask you to sign over the title to them to facilitate the process. They then legally own your home, and can do whatever they want with it.
It’s always hard to tell if an unsolicited call is a scam—so your best bet is to just ignore them.
Most unsolicited real estate offers aren’t outright scams—but that doesn’t mean they’re a good idea. One big reason is simple: An unsolicited offer is usually going to be a lowball offer that won’t get you the most money for your property. That’s because these offers come from three main groups of people:
Wholesalers. Wholesalers enter into purchase contracts on properties, then turn around and sell the house to a third party. Sometimes they already have a buyer for your home, sometimes they just think finding one will be easy. In either case, they’re going to lowball you on the sale price because they need to make a profit. If your home can get $250,000 on the market, they will offer you $200,000 and hope to make $50k in profit. They hope that the convenience of getting an unsolicited offer will tempt you into making an “easy” sale.
Flippers. You’re probably familiar with the concept of house-flipping, where investors buy run-down properties for cheap, renovate them quickly, and sell them before they get too deep into mortgage payments. You might assume flippers always target foreclosures, but they also do cold-call outreach if your neighborhood is desirable—and it’s the nature of their business to lowball you on the price in order to maximize their profits.
Individual buyers. Sometimes that unsolicited offer comes from someone who legitimately wants to buy your house for themselves. Homes are expensive these days—the median home price is about $413,000—so some folks try to beat the market by making unsolicited lowball offers in the hope that the current owner just jumps at it instead of doing their due diligence.
Even if the buyer isn’t trying to scam you—and even if they make a fair offer on the property—you still might lose out because the unsolicited offer prevents any bidding wars that might drive up the price of your home and increase your profit on the sale. If an unsolicited offer makes you decide to sell your home, you’ll probably make more money if you list it.
A third reason to ignore all unsolicited real estate calls is because responding to one forces you to work with someone you know nothing about. They may not be licensed real estate professionals at all, and might encourage you not to involve a real estate pro in order to avoid their fees, or pressure you to work with their team to close the sale. In other words, they’ll appeal to your greed.
Bypassing a real estate agent can save you some money, but it also leaves you without their expert guidance and knowledge of both the market and the law—and leaves you reliant on some rando who called you out of the blue for your information. If the unexpected offer is appealing, you should seek the advice of a professional and research the entity making the offer to understand if they’re on the up-and-up or sketchy AF.
If an unsolicited call about selling your house makes you think it might be the right move, you’ll almost always do better by going through the usual process of selling your home. An unsolicited offer indicates your home is valuable, so you’ll probably get a better offer from the open market, and working with a legit real estate agent who understands your market will also probably maximize your profit even when fees are taken into consideration. Just like everything in life, the easy route is rarely the best one.
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StoryCorps founder Dave Isay and TED’s Helen Walters open Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)
In Session 6 of TED2024, we heard from bridge-builders — inspiring speakers working to unite people across political divides, conflicts, differences and more.
The event: Talks from Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, hosted by TED’s Helen Walters and Dave Isay, the founder of StoryCorps and winner of the 2015 TED Prize
When and where: Wednesday, April 17, 2024, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada
Speakers: Gabrielle Rifkind, David Finnigan, Ketakandriana Rafitoson, Spencer J. Cox, Daniel Lubetzky
Micah Handler (left) and Amer Abu Arqub speak at Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)
Performance: The Jerusalem Youth Chorus (JYC) is a choral and dialogue program for Palestinian and Israeli youth in Jerusalem. JYC’s founder Micah Hendler and executive director Amer Abu Arqub discuss the impetus behind the program, how music creates cross-cultural understanding and introduce the chorus itself for a rousing performance.
Gabrielle Rifkind speaks at Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)
Gabrielle Rifkind is director of the Oxford Process, an organization devoted to ending armed conflict with the tools of mass psychology and geopolitics, rather than the weapons of war. With inclusive negotiating strategies, she believes we can create a world where nations rush to the bargaining table rather than to their guns.
David Finnigan speaks at Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
In the wake of his production Kill Climate Deniers, playwright David Finnigan received countless messages from everyday individuals defending their beliefs. While climate deniers still refuse to believe science, says Finnigan, they’re right about one thing: climate action requires us to change how we live — and that’s something we all should embrace.
Ketakandriana Rafitoson speaks at Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)
In Madagascar, activist Ketakandriana Rafitoson empowers citizens to protect their rights in the face of systemic exploitation. In the absence of strong democratic traditions, her grassroots toolkit of citizen assemblies, legal aid and collective action is helping to organize Madagascar, one community at a time.
Governor of Utah Spencer J. Cox speaks at Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Ryan Lash / TED)
When he felt his faith in the peaceful transfer of power in the US eroding, Governor of Utah Spencer J. Cox reached out to his political opponent to produce a campaign ad — together. It sparked a nationwide conversation about bridging political divides and fostering a united society. On the TED stage, he shares three things we can all do to disagree without hate.
Daniel Lubetzky speaks at Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED)
We’re being programmed to think every issue is binary: “us versus them.” But Daniel Lubetzky says the real enemy is not a person but a mindset: extremism that hijacks the agenda and foments division. He previews a new initiative that aims to bring together “builders” (instead of “dividers”) from around the world and across the political spectrum, to replace eternal conflict with practical problem-solving.
Backstage at Session 6 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Photo: Jasmina Tomic / TED)
TED2024, held April 15-19, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is a week of talks, discovery sessions, excursions, dinners, performances and more celebrating “The Brave and the Brilliant.” Special thanks to our strategic partners PwC, Adobe, Schneider Electric and Northwestern Mutual.
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Chances are you have a lot of stuff in your house. Possibly also in a storage unit. And maybe at your parents’ house, your ex’s place, and liberally scattered throughout the globe. We all accumulate a ton of things as we go through life—it’s estimated that the average home has about 300,000 things in it, if you count all the small stuff like that bowl of paper clips on your desk.
Every now and then you get the idea to clean it all out and maybe sell some of it, to free yourself of all that clutter while making a tidy profit on stuff you don’t even use any more. If that’s the mode you’re in right now, consider parting out some of your stuff instead of just selling it whole, because you can potentially make a lot more money that way.
“Parting out” is the process of disassembling something and selling the individual parts, which often have a distinct value all their own. If someone has an old car that won’t run because it needs a replacement part, they probably don’t want to buy an entire replacement car when they could just buy the part they need—and they’re often willing to pay a premium for the convenience.
Parting out your possessions isn’t always easy—it takes time, effort, and some knowledge to do it effectively (not to mention specific tools, in many cases). But if you’ve got a bunch of unused stuff lying around, look into what might be worth parting out instead of just dumping on eBay as-is. You can part out almost anything—if it has parts, there’s a decent chance someone, somewhere is looking for them—but not everything is going to be worth your time and effort unless you’re going to spin it up into a business. For example, parting out vacuum cleaners can be profitable, but also requires a lot of work, and parting out your old vacuum when it stops working won’t necessarily be worth it.
An easy way to tell if the parts in your junk are worth something is to pop into eBay and search around there—this can also give you an idea of the prices you can charge for parts, and whether the potential profit is worth your time. There are also often specific forums or marketplaces online for different parts, so it’s worth googling those as well to see if your parts are in demand.
Cars are by far the most common things to sell for parts. People are keeping their cars for longer than ever, and car parts are in short supply, which drives up their value. And if you have an old, vintage car rusting away in your garage, some of those parts might be worth serious money. Even non-vintage car parts can net you some cash—depending on mileage, condition, and the make and model of the car, the engine might be worth $500 or more by itself, and the airbags could be worth $150-$200. If you have the tools, time, and expertise to part out a car (or a motorcycle, or even a bicycle) you can gather estimated value for each part and compare it to the price you’d get for selling the vehicle as a whole.
If you have a computer, whether it’s a tricked-out desktop gaming machine, a cheap Chromebook, or even a Mac, you can part it out. Between hobbyists building their own machines and frugal folks trying to keep an old warhorse running, there’s a lot of demand for many of the components inside your home computer—and plenty of places to sell them. While some of those components require some tools and knowledge to remove, others, like the RAM sticks and graphics card, are pretty easy to pull with just a screwdriver and some patience.
Laptops can be more challenging because of their compact nature; many components in a laptop are soldered into place or very difficult to access. But if the laptop isn’t functioning anyway, it can still be worth your time to harvest parts. Searching the internet for your specific model of computer and seeing what parts people are looking for or selling will give you an idea of what’s worth salvaging from that old computer.
If you have some old board games piled up in the garage or basement, don’t toss them—they could be pretty valuable to collectors and enthusiasts. And they’re going to generate more money if you part them out, because people often find themselves missing the original pieces from an old game purchased at a garage sale or found in their basement or garage. In fact, eBay has a dedicated section just for board game pieces where you can research what you might make. Most of these pieces don’t sell for a ton of money by themselves, but you can make more money parting out that old game than from selling it as a unit.
Setting up a guitar requires knowledge and skill. Tearing an electric guitar apart requires a screwdriver. Like everything else on this list, unless your guitar is a classic vintage axe that can fetch a lot of money, it’s usually more profitable to part out an old beat-up electric guitar, selling everything from the neck to the humbuckers separately on eBay or another online marketplace. Many musicians want to build their own guitars from specific parts, or need to replace worn out parts on their guitars and want to save some money by doing the work themselves (or have trouble finding a rare part), and you can profit from that.
People who love LEGO are serious about it. As you might imagine, assembling a complex LEGO set only to discover you’re missing a few pieces—or maybe, most infuriatingly, one piece—is incredibly frustrating. That’s why sites like Bricklink exist—so you can find and purchase LEGO parts. If you have some LEGO sets you’re looking to liquidate, you can use Bricklink to find out the rough part out value, which can be a surprisingly high number.
Head of TED Chris Anderson and Audacious Project executive director Anna Verghese host Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Ryan Lash / TED)
For Session 4 of TED2024, illuminators from diverse disciplines explored the bright future of their fields. From AI as a digital species to explosive art that climbs into the sky, speakers looked at how light (literally and figuratively) can shape our climate, social interactions, scientific discoveries and more.
The event: Talks from Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant, cohosted by head of TED Chris Anderson and executive director of the Audacious Project Anna Verghese
When and where: Tuesday, April 16, 2024, at the Vancouver Convention Centre in Vancouver, BC, Canada
Speakers: Mustafa Suleyman, Nour E. Rawafi, Millie Chu Baird, Sarah J. Doherty, Sara Giusto, Cai Guo-Qiang
An audacious update: Videos throughout the session provided updates on the Audacious Project’s 2018 cohort, including Girl Trek, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), Sightsavers, The Bail Project and Living Goods + Last Mile Health. Learn more about their work.
JA Collective performs at Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Ryan Lash / TED)
Performance: Jordan Johnson and Aidan Carberry’s JA Collective perform a hypnotic exploration of movement, alternating between the abrupt and fluid, moving one another across the stage accompanied by stunny visual art.
The talks in brief:
Mustafa Suleyman speaks at Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Ryan Lash / TED)
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman offers a vision of a future infused with AGI, proposing that AI’s ubiquity and skillset make it more than just a tool — it should instead be considered a digital species. While the metaphor may not be perfect, he suggests this framework can allow us to better consider how we want AI to grow and where we need to be more cautious.
Nour E. Rawafi speaks at Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Ryan Lash / TED)
From sustaining life on Earth to its potential for catastrophic solar storms, astrophysicist Nour E. Rawafi sheds light on why understanding the sun is crucial to our future. He illuminates its enduring mysteries and humanity’s next technological steps to unraveling them — like sending probes on a galactic journey into the atomosphere of our fiery neighbor.
Millie Chu Baird speaks at Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Ryan Lash / TED)
Even though its atmospheric volume is dwarfed by that of CO2, methane is 80 times more effective at trapping heat. Thus, cutting methane emissions is key to tackling climate change, says environmental advocate Millie Chu Baird. With the help of a new satellite called MethaneSAT, supported by the Audacious Project, she hopes to improve ourunderstanding of where all that methane comes from as well as our ability to address its impacts.
Sarah J. Doherty speaks at Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Ryan Lash / TED)
Aerosol emissions are responsible for the deaths of between four and 10 million people, but they also cool the planet (by about half a degree, scientists estimate) by making clouds more reflective, bouncing sunlight back into space. Atmospheric scientist Sarah J. Doherty explains how we might both reduce pollution and lower temperatures by replacing toxic aerosols with their natural counterparts.
Sara Giusto speaks at Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Ryan Lash / TED)
Sara Giusto is a talent manager — but not in the way you might imagine. Her biggest client is imma: a pink-bobbed, CGI-created “virtual human” influencer. Giusto shares how imma’s influence extends to real-world issues and emotions, raising an important question: In an increasingly virtual world, what’s really real?
Cai Guo-Qiang speaks at Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Gilberto Tadday / TED)
Speaking in Mandarin translated live with an AI-generated imitation of his voice powered by technology from Metaphysic, multidisciplinary artist Cai Guo-Qiang shares how he creates captivating spectacles from gunpowder and fireworks, enchanting audiences worldwide with scenes of alien footprints, mushroom clouds and more.
TED attendees share a fun moment before Session 4 of TED2024: The Brave and the Brilliant on Tuesday, April 16, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada. (Gilberto Tadday / TED)
TED2024, held April 15-19, 2024, in Vancouver, BC, Canada, is a week of talks, discovery sessions, excursions, dinners, performances and more celebrating “The Brave and the Brilliant.” Special thanks to our strategic partners PwC, Adobe, Schneider Electric and Northwestern Mutual.
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