#10 YEAR OLD HOUSE FLIPPER FOR FREE#
#10 YEAR OLD HOUSE FLIPPER LICENSE#
#10 YEAR OLD HOUSE FLIPPER WINDOWS#

They'll do this for free if you agree to let them sell the home for you when you're done with the remodel.įor my first flip, I hired a lot of people.

Get an experienced agent to pull comparisons for you and help you understand ARV. When you start out, you want to be more conservative and ignore outliers. I try to find home sales that have also been remodeled and take a gut average of those. I'm big on finding what we call the 'after-remodel value.' I make an educated guess based on the sales from three to 10 comparable homes within a quarter-mile or half-mile radius of the home. So if I sell a house for $1.8 million, I want to make at least $180,000 to take on that risk. That's based on Utah's median home price. I target making $30,000 to $40,000 per house, and I get that pretty regularly. I don't really get into a house unless we're making at least 10% of the value when it's done. This price range is not one I recommend to new investors - higher payouts come with higher risks. I'm doing a lot bigger deals, with acquisition costs between $700,000 and $1 million and a sale value between $1.3 million and $1.8 million. The last couple of years I've been flipping 60 or so and focusing instead on quality over quantity. I have a standard method of calculating costs and profits (Editor's note: Insider reviewed a spreadsheet to verify Maxim's total portfolio.)

Since I started, I've flipped more than 1,000 properties that total $500 million in real estate. Most importantly, I learned that I had to be at the top of my game - otherwise I'd have all these houses and a lot of debt. There are many unknowns in fix and flip - if my spreadsheet were always right, I'd be building rockets with Jeff Bezos. I also learned that the end number on the spreadsheet never seems to be the end number you actually get. Buyers care a lot more about design than function.

#10 YEAR OLD HOUSE FLIPPER WINDOWS#

New windows can cost $15,000, while end buyers will assign almost no value to that - whereas a backsplash in a kitchen can add nearly $10,000 in value and only cost $1,000 to put in. For example, the cost of what you put into a home often doesn't equal its value. Most people usually give up at that point.īut I learned a lot of things from it. I actually hardly made any money on that flip - around $6,000 after 7 or 8 months of work. I found an old friend from church who said he believed in me, and he lent me the money to do my first flip. I got the house under contract and called everybody I knew to ask if they would lend me money. I tried to get a mortgage to buy the property because lenders typically won't finance properties with known structural issues.

If I was the agent on the deal, I wouldn't have to pay the fee. That's because there's at least 2.5% of the total sale price in commission fees on all my deals, as the typical commission on a home sale is between 5% and 6% that the seller's and buyer's agents split.

#10 YEAR OLD HOUSE FLIPPER LICENSE#

After that, I was looking into buying a fourplex rental and realized I could save even more money if I got my real-estate license This opened my eyes to real estate as an avenue for making money - even with no background in it. I moved a mattress and a dresser under the stairs in the house, and that became my room.Īfter our mortgage and bills, we were making $1,000 to $1,500 a month in passive income. We converted one bedroom to have four bunk beds and rented out the spare rooms. The following has been edited for length and clarity.īack in 2000, some friends and I bought and created our own little frat house. This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with John Maxim, a house flipper of 15 years based in Salt Lake City, Utah, about his job. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

10 year old house flipper