My Blog, Real Estate Advice

Home Flipping

Can you make fast $$ in flipping homes? Our experience has been buying and selling our own personal homes which we live in for 6 months or more, fixing them up and then selling them again. This prevented us from having to pay capital gains taxes, and giving us the opportunity to control our spending.
First thing to do is to buy WISE, i.e. 1) location-location-location. Make sure you are buying a home in a good neighbourhood, and ensuring the home is not the largest one in the block; 2) know the market and try to buy low (insist on a Comparable Market Report from your REALTOR – call me if you need one as you do your research); 3) when you renovate your flipper, think reuse/recycle/restore as you go from room to room. This will reduce your input costs and allow your best return on your investment.
Our experiences in the 12-13 homes that we flipped, we found that one of the best flippers was a small war-time 1.5 storey home which we kept for about 1 year, spent about $3,000 (modified a 2 pc powder room to 3 pc washroom upstairs, renovated the kitchen with new counters, backsplash & paint, and re-decorated the paneling with feather dusted painting application). We made a nice profit from this home which we used to buy a nice rancher in a wooded lot in the country. Our ‘country estate’ was also resold in 4 years, with minimal renovations (some paint and paper and a purchase of some neighbouring land in the wood lot to expand the basic property size) which netted me approximately a 22% improvement on my investment.