You can check whether a we buy houses company in Calgary is legitimate before you sign anything

Most companies advertising that they buy houses for cash in Calgary are real businesses buying real houses, and the province gives you free, public ways to tell which one you are dealing with. A licence search takes about a minute, and a written disclosure that a licensed buyer owes you has to arrive before an offer is ever put in front of you.

What tends to go wrong in Alberta is not the theatrical version people picture. It is an offer that quietly changes between the handshake and the paperwork, or a buyer who never appears at closing because the deal was handed to someone else. Both of those are visible in advance if you know where to look.

RECA runs a free licence search, and it answers a narrower question than you think

The Real Estate Council of Alberta licenses the province's real estate professionals and publishes a public search, RECA ProCheck, where anyone can type in a name and see licence status. RECA tells consumers directly to "use RECA ProCheck to quickly verify their licence status."

The useful part is knowing what a result actually proves. Not being licensed is not, by itself, a warning sign. Somebody buying a house for their own account is a buyer, the same as any private purchaser, and buyers are not required to hold a real estate licence. Plenty of legitimate cash buyers hold none.

What matters is the match between what they told you and what the register says. A buyer who mentions a licence, or a brokerage, or describes themselves as being "in real estate," and then cannot be found in ProCheck has given you a straightforward reason to slow down. So has a buyer who will not give you a name to search at all.

Run the search on the individual as well as the business name. Companies appear and disappear; people are harder to reissue.

A licensed buyer owes you a written disclosure, and RECA fixes the timing

This is the check nobody writes about, and it is the one with actual rules behind it.

When a licensed Alberta real estate professional buys a property for themselves rather than acting as an agent, RECA's guidance on personal trades in real estate requires a written disclosure to the other side. Where the seller is unrepresented, that disclosure has to set out "any direct or indirect interest they have in the transaction," "the name of their brokerage and they are authorized to trade in real estate," complete details of any negotiations for a future trade of the property, and any information they hold that could materially affect its value. The bulletin cites sections 41(f) and 62 of the Real Estate Act Rules.

The timing is not left to the buyer's judgment. RECA's wording is that professionals "must make written disclosures at the earliest practical opportunity and before presentation of an offer."

So the question is easy to ask and the answer is easy to grade. If the person buying your house holds a licence, that piece of paper should already be in your hands, and it should have arrived before you saw a price. Learning about the licence afterwards, or hearing it mentioned in conversation and never seeing it written down, is a rule being broken rather than a matter of style. RECA takes complaints from the public at complaints.myreca.ca.

It also works the other way. A buyer who hands you that disclosure without being chased has told you something useful about how the rest of the transaction will be run.

Ask who will actually be on the transfer, and have the answer written down

An offer is a promise from a named party. The risk worth asking about is that the named party never intends to be the one who closes, and instead plans to pass the contract to somebody else for a fee.

That practice is not automatically improper, and there are situations where a seller does not mind. The problem is being unaware of it, because it changes who you are relying on. The party you checked, whose funds you asked about, whose disclosure you read, may not be the party who has to complete the purchase.

The question is simple: are you buying this house yourself, or do you intend to assign the contract? Whatever the answer, ask for it to appear in the contract rather than in a reply. A buyer content to write it down is telling you the truth is survivable. One who resists putting it in writing has answered a different and more useful question.

Your own lawyer should read any assignment wording before you sign, because what it permits varies with how it is drafted.

The number to compare is the one with the deductions written on it

Every honest cash offer shrinks between the headline and the cheque, for reasons that are nobody's fault: the mortgage gets paid out, property tax and utilities are adjusted to the closing date, and any registered claim on the title has to clear. A buyer who lists those on the offer is showing you the real figure. A buyer who gives you one number and waves at the rest is not being generous, they are deferring a conversation you will have anyway, at a worse moment.

The same goes for the deposit. A deposit belongs in a lawyer's or a brokerage's trust account, not in the buyer's own hands, and asking where it will sit is a normal question that a normal buyer answers immediately.

Our own method is set out on what we pay, and how the process runs is written so that nothing is signed until the last step. Compare that against whatever you are being offered elsewhere, line by line, rather than headline against headline.

Much of the advice you will find was written for another country

Search this question and most of the first page is American. Those articles will tell you to check your state's attorney general, look up a state licensing board, rely on a Better Business Bureau letter grade, or apply a fixed percentage-of-value rule of thumb drawn from a different market.

None of that maps cleanly onto Alberta. There is no state board here. The regulator is RECA, the register is ProCheck, and the complaint route is the one above. Percentage rules of thumb quoted from American articles describe American housing stock and American renovation costs, and a figure repeated confidently in an article is not an offer anyone has made on your house.

This is the same trap that catches sellers reading about what they have to disclose, where American mandatory disclosure forms get presented as though they applied in Alberta. When something you read gives a crisp answer about a legal duty, check which jurisdiction it belongs to before you rely on it.

When we are the wrong buyer for you

If your house is in reasonable shape and your timeline is your own, a normal listing will almost certainly put more in your pocket than any as-is offer, ours included. The verification above still matters, but the honest recommendation is a Realtor rather than us. That is what our pricing page says as well.

If what you actually want is a second opinion on somebody else's offer, get it from a lawyer or a Realtor who is not bidding on your house. We are not a neutral party here, and neither is any other buyer.

And if you are in the middle of something unresolved, an insurance claim, a builder's lien, a boundary argument, that has to be sorted or disclosed whoever buys. Selling for cash changes who inherits the problem rather than making it go away. Selling a house as is in Alberta covers which obligations survive that clause, and a damaged house is where to start if condition is the reason you are looking at cash buyers in the first place.

If you would rather talk it through, tell us about the house and we will say honestly whether we are the right buyer for it.