Oops in real estate can be costly

​One of the biggest mistakes made by newer  investors is buying  the wrong  property. In the beginning when buying a house to flip or sell quickly, you don’t want a house needing major work unless you are a contractor and have experience enough to know exactly what it is going to cost you and you want to do the work.

​When I first started I had no building skills at all.  However, I could paint and I could clean up messes.  I could mow the lawn and I could trim shrubs.  So that is what I looked for.  Primarily this will be a house that just needs cosmetic work to increase its value.  My objective was to find a house that  needed  less than three weeks of my work. Usually the house  needed something that was beyond my ability so then I would hire a person for a day or two to complete that phase of the work.  There are many houses out there that are filthy dirty, filled with junk, have overgrown lawns, or are just in the state of disrepair due to lack of  interest. These houses have the potential to pay  well  just by making them  look  nice again.  When  you  find  houses like this you can do the work fairly quickly and without a lot of cost.  The return on your time can be quite  substantial.

A house that  is full of garbage and /or filthy dirty can be devalued by 25% or more. It also scares many people away. Admittedly, some houses I have done take a strong stomach but it can translate to many hundreds of dollars per hour.

Many  times when you get in to doing  your own repairs to a house, your profit per hour drops substantially. It is not necessarily a bad  thing as it can give you valuable experience. It will help you know how long jobs should take and whether a contractor is giving you a reasonable quote.

So start with the easy ones. Ones that any ambitious 16 year old could do most of the work. There is much less  chance of oops, I didn’t know how much that would cost or oops, I didn’t figure in that repair.

As always, I wish you success,

Ed Emmons