Читать книгу Flipping Houses For Dummies - Ralph R. Roberts - Страница 23

The most critical stage of flipping a house is finding and buying the right house to flip. Buy a lousy house in a lousy neighborhood for more than it’s worth, and you’ve already lost the game. Finding a house with substantial profit potential is quite a challenge, but as a flipper, that’s the fun part. Flipping is an adventure, a treasure hunt, and a poker game all rolled into one.

Finding and buying a property is a four-step process:

1 Scope out a fertile neighborhood — often an area with homes that are at least 20 years old.See Chapter 5 for details.

2 Zoom in on a dontwanner — a distressed property that the owner obviously doesn’t want or can’t afford to keep.A distressed house usually has a distressed owner. See Chapters 6, 7, and 8 for various ways to find distressed properties. (Landscape maintenance is typically a good, early indication of a distressed property.)

3 Research the property carefully and then calculate the most you can pay for it and still earn a decent profit.You should be fairly certain that you’ll earn at least 20 percent for your trouble. See Part 3 for more about researching and evaluating properties and calculating a maximum purchase price.

4 Haggle with the seller to purchase the house at a price that virtually ensures you’ll profit from the flip, as I explain in Chapter 12.In some cases, you won’t haggle with sellers but bid at an auction instead; see Chapters 7 and 8 for details on finding and buying properties in foreclosure and other special markets.