One of the fastest ways to make money in real estate is through flipping houses, which is also referred to as wholesaling houses.

It is also the real estate investing model that probably requires the least amount of work and cash invested into each deal.

Flipping houses involves locating houses at below market prices, then “flipping” them to other real estate investors at a discount.

Most of these properties come from distressed home owners (motivated sellers), such as home owners facing foreclosure, going through divorce, job loss, job relocation, illness, or simply cannot afford to keep making mortgage payments.

Sometimes they just need to get rid of the house, but cannot afford to do the repairs needed, or simply don’t want to do it. They therefore accept to sell the houses at a discount for a quick and easy closing.

When you flip a house, the profit may not be very big (such as when you sell at retail), but you make your money fast, typically within two weeks.

The process goes something like this:

1) Real estate investor locates discounted property from a motivated seller and puts it under contract

2) He then takes this contract to the title company to get the title work done to ensure the property will be delivered free and clear

3) Another real estate investor (wholesale buyer) acquires the house through one of two methods:

a) He takes over their contract for an assignment fee and closes on the property himself or

b) He buys the property from the investor in a double closing (simultaneous closing). In this case you buy the property and sell it to the wholesale buyer on the same closing table.

The wholesale buyer ends up doing most of the work (such as repair) and makes more money eventually after they fix and sell.

You as the real estate investor flipping the house have to leave more money on the table for the wholesale buyer.

Typically, you must locate properties for sale at 65% of market price minus repairs or less if you are to wholesale a deal successfully. Most wholesale buyers will express less interest when the profits go below this figure.

You must then quickly find wholesale buyers with cash in order to flip your property quickly.

Finding buyers often involves a combination of methods, both online and offline. The more methods you can employ, the more likely you are to find a cash buyer.

Offline methods include advertising the property to local real estate investors in local newspapers. I always make sure to give them my web site, rather than my phone number. Using a well designed landing page (squeeze page), they have to give me their name email and phone number before they can access my deals – building a very powerful buyers list.

The first thing I do is to email my deals to my buyers list, a list of active real estate investors I have accumulated both from local REI meetings and my website.

Each person inevitably ends up on my web site to view the full details of the property such as comps, live video vitual tours and pictures. In the process, they can email this deal to their friends exposing the deal to more potential buyers.

Real Estate, Fix and Flip or Hold

Fix and Flip or Hold. This method will entail using an Agreement of Sale and Purchase coupled with a short sale whereby you get a super price to buy now. Since you are the Buyer and not getting an option to assign, it is strongly recommended to do a very through inspection yourself or hire a certified home inspector.

The intent here is to buy at a super price and then invest monies to fix it up to a polished state and resell to retail Buyer or an Investor that doesn’t want to fix, but rather hold and rent.

The trick here is NOT to “fall in love” with the property and overspend as if you are your family were going to live there. Do the basics and give it a good polish so it functions and looks great. It needs to attract a Buyer, appraise correctly and be able to earn you a profit.

You can also do the same and hold onto it and use it as rental for yourself, live off the cash flow and take advantage of future appreciation. Many Investors just want to live off the rental income.

Another abbreviated method is to take a real junker with lots of potential and just merely do a serious cleanup so it presents in a much better fashion and then just wholesale it as is.

This method can also be done under the Option and Assignment just knowing that if you walk away, you will have done the work for someone else at your expense. 

To learn more about the amazing value of fixing and flipping properties, please visit our website or contact us for more in depth information. Have questions…please contact us.

The $10,000 question (actually in most cases, this question is worth much more than 10 grand): which house makes a good fix-and-flip candidate? Well there are plenty of attributes to consider when trying to answer this question. The first thing you should do is pre-qualify an entire area or neighborhood. When doing this, there are a number of factors you need to research. However, after you qualify an area (we can call this your “farm”), finding potential fixer-uppers will be much easier.

When qualifying an area, start at the city-level and look at data that is readily available on the Internet. First and foremost, check the quality of the school district within a city you’re analyzing. Make sure it ranks above average within your state. Second, check the crime rate for that city. Make sure it ranks below average for your state. If both of these results are satisfactory, it’s time to hone in on the neighborhoods within that city.

When qualifying a neighborhood, it’s best to choose a neighborhood that isn’t “slum cheap” but also isn’t “yuppie rich”. You want to find a nice medium price range of homes that is both comfortable for a wide market of buyers in your state and has a good level of desirability. The larger your market, the better your chances of selling a property quickly.

Choose cities and neighborhoods that are within a comfortable distance from your home. You will likely make over a dozen round-trips to this property, so unless the profit potential is enormous, try to choose something close enough that will be “worth the drive”. The final factor when choosing a neighborhood is to look at the past sales within the last year or two and figure out the answer to this question: what is the average number of days does it take to sell a home in this neighborhood? If the answer is “less than 90 days”, that indicates that there is a level of desirability and demand – something that definitely makes houses in this neighborhood desirable to you. There might be websites on the Internet that provide this information – if not, seek out your Realtor.

Once you have your target neighborhoods and you know what type of houses go for what kind of price, finding potential fixer-uppers becomes much easier. More often than not, these properties will come in the form of foreclosures. Have your Realtor conduct daily searches for you. Next, you’ll need to determine what your operational budget is. This is the amount of money that is readily available to you for rehabilitating properties. To reduce your personal financial risk, do not include money in your bank account(s) when calculating this number. Simply add your available credit lines on your credit cards. For example, if you have $2,000 left on a Visa and $7,000 on a Home Depot card, your operational budget is $9,000.

After hammering down what your operation budget is and you find a potential fixer-upper, have your Realtor give you a ball-park estimate as to what it would sell for in a fixed-up state. Likely, your Realtor will review past sales of comparable properties in that same neighborhood to come up with an accurate guess. Take that number and subtract 10% (this represents bargaining room with buyers) – this is your estimated sale price.

Finally, decide how much money you feel is worth all this effort. This becomes your target profit. Now you can determine how much you can afford to offer for the property by doing some quick math: (estimated sales price) – (operational budget) – (your target profit) = the maximum price you should pay for the property Now that you know the maximum price, be sure to offer well under it to allow for some bargaining room.

If a property is located in a “qualified area” and passes the “quick math” test, you have a strong potential candidate for a possible fix-and-flip property! For more free articles and previews to The Field Guide to Flipping Homes, visit the official site at www.homeflippingfieldguide.com!

Flipping real estate properties has become a popular method of gaining big money for many people regardless of whether or not they have prior background in real estate. Investors have been drawn to this venture mostly utilizing residential properties. Some achieved great success and have stayed in the business up until now while some became unlucky but continue to do their best to succeed.

It’s true that this venture has huge cash potential but it’s not all easy work. Planning and research before engaging in any project is a good way to start. Do understand as well that basic buying and selling skills are required in this venture in addition to being resourceful in finding the right properties and homebuyers. For those who wish to make it in this field, it’s best to opt for the legitimate ways all the time. Stay away from mortgage fraud and prepare your funds ahead of time to allow you to close on a deal quickly. Learning about your current market condition as well as the comparable homes that sold in your area is also highly recommended.

In searching for properties to flip, one of the best options is to go for foreclosures. These are the distressed homes whose owners have defaulted on their mortgage payments. The property is declared a foreclosure by a lender when a notice of the owner’s default is filed in public records. One way of checking this type of property is through a lending institution or the government’s housing department website. Normally, lenders want to let go of properties they reclaim as fast as possible and most of the time, they hold auctions to sell these properties.

Once you’ve browsed through the list of foreclosures, you can make a short list of your target properties and pick out only the good deals before you begin making a personal visit to their locations. The next step is to find out where to contact the owner after which you can already negotiate to buy the property. Most homeowners are in dire need of funds so start by offering to help them in their situation by paying cash. Be sure that the price is low enough to your advantage.
You can also contact the mortgage holder if you’re unsure where to get in touch with the homeowner. This will all depend on whether you are purchasing the house during the preforeclosure stage or after the property has already been repossessed by the lender.

During this stage, make sure that you have prepared a sufficient budget to finance your project. If you’re not using personal funds, you can apply for financing or get a trustworthy partner who can fund your deal.

After you’ve bought the property, take some time to fix it up a bit to make it attractive to your potential buyers. A little upgrade is vital in flipping homes and drawing more buyers.
Once you’re done with the renovation work, you now have a choice whether to resell the property by yourself or with the help of a real estate agent or rent it out to ensure regularity in cash flow and to cover your mortgage.

Keep in mind that flipping foreclosures takes a lot of hard work and patience. The real estate market may fluctuate from time to time but know that you can always earn money regardless of its condition.

House flipping of the past several years has become increasingly popular due to reality TV shows such as flip this house and flip that house. These shows motivated people to get out and try to make money in the real estate game.

The only problem is that the mortgage markets got slammed due to bad loans such as adjustable rate mortgages. This produced an all time high record of foreclosures nationwide, and people found themselves in the middle of the mortgage crunch.

I live and Dallas, and I know that Dallas mortgage lenders have had to start cracking down on mortgage loan approvals that in turn means fewer loans. With less people getting approved for houses and more houses for sale than ever before this presents a huge problem for someone trying to flip a house.

So, is house flipping still possible in Dallas? I believe so, but in order to flip a house these days the rules have changed. You will have to buy a Dallas foreclosure at the absolute lowest price you can get the banks to negotiate down to, and then fix it up on an extremely tight budget.

In order to sell you house you will need to have the best looking house in your neighborhood at the most competitive price. Now, most of the foreclosures looking like run down dumps, and a family that is looking for a house to live in is not going to want to buy that, so you need to compete with the houses that are fixed up in your area.

The key to flipping a house in Dallas is making a solid budget, and sticking to it. You cannot afford to blow you budget in todays mortgage market because you cannot raise the price of the house to cover your budget mishaps. Instead, you need to figure out what you are going to pay for the house. Then, how much it will cost to fix it up, and be sure to add about 10 percent to you figures for repairs that you might have missed or just do not know about. After that you need to get it on the market as fast as possible and market the house by every means possible.

You can flip a house but you are going to have to think out of the box and be creative on how you plan to sell you house. Open houses, craigslist, make a whole website about the house, pass out flyer’s in the neighbor hood, these are just a few ideas that can really increase you chances of a quick sale in a slow market.

If you are afraid of the current mortgage market you might consider purchasing a Dallas foreclosure at the current prices and rent the house out. Real estate will always be one of the top investments you can own because there is only so much dirt, so get out there and get in the game and start to build your wealth and prosper.

Flipping a house can be a great real estate investment. But in order for you to begin any serious house flipping you need to have a great credit score. Many people are addicted to the house flipping shows on television and are really interested in learning how to flip a house. If you really want to learn how to flip a house there are many places you can go for information. There are websites and you can even find seminars at your local community college or hotel conference room to learn the art of house flipping. But the best way is to find someone who has been doing it for a while and see if you can work for them.

Flipping properties is when an investor purchases a house, fixes it up and/or brings it to code and then sell it for a reasonable profit. The process of flipping properties has created a huge rush in the real estate market. Both the United States and Canada have a number of cities that would be great for flipping a house.
In the United States there are ten cities that are great for flipping homes. These cities are: Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Raleigh NC, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, Boston, NY City, and last but not least Portland. Now we move on to Canada. The best cities in Canada for flipping homes are: Calgary & Saskatewan.

All of these cities have great potential when it comes to flipping homes. But as with any investment you need to do your research and be careful. With the low cost of homes now it could be better than ever to buy homes to flip. You may need to wait a little while until the market kicks back up again to sell the homes. But if you have the money and can afford to wait longer than thirty days to sell you may find yourself with a great investment and a nice fat bank account.