Looking through the local newspaper in Barrington, I came across a real estate related advertisement that was in the form of an article advising about the practice of flipping real estate.
It was obviously one of the many real estate articles that professionals can purchase from any one of a million services that real estate agents can reprint with their information to make it seem like they are an expert in the topic and here is why:
The information was pretty generic and not specific to any area with no examples of say.. Barrington real estate. There were no examples of what a potential rehabbers Internal rate of return should be on their investment, what somebody interested in doing this should look for and the pitfalls to avoid such as attempting to resell the home for more then what the market will bear.
To sum it all up it basically said that the practice of rehabbing homes and flipping them for a profit (and all of the TV shows that came along with it) was created by a hot real estate market and now that the real estate market has cooled off, that this practice was no longer profitable.
Absolutely not true. While the practice of rehabbing homes is not as easy as reading "Flipping Homes for Dummies", restoring homes and re-selling them for a profit can certainly work in a normal real estate market especially in an area such as Barrington Illinois. When you can find a real estate area where there is a combination of older vintage homes, brand new million dollar luxury custom homes and a strong push for downtown redevelopment in place, you can certainly find opportunity to rehab and sell homes for a profit. In fact, just driving down Hough St. and Hillside there are two homes currently being rehabbed and on Hillside there are two Barrington Illinois homes that just got leveled to build new homes on. It's not very easy to find vacant lots available for sale within the Barrington Village for sale at a good price.
Currently, there is a very cool vintage Victorian home in the historic section of Barrington that we had our eyes on to rehab and flip ourselves but the original list price was overpriced in our opinion by sellers to begin with. Eventually they did lower the price and somebody else snatched it up at a great price and is currently rehabbing it. It will be quite interesting to see if they do it right but according to our rough calculations and if done properly, this home should be able to hit the market and be more then a great price that will sell fast at $500,000. Key words: If done right which to us means more then just replacing flooring and putting in new cheap cabinets and appliances.
Another key is being able to do all of the work and keep the potential selling price below or at market value for a quick sale because when you get into the art of flipping homes, time is money. Getting greedy will get you broke.
There is certainly opportunity to flip homes in a real estate market such as Barrington. You just need to know what to look for and what know what you are doing before jumping into this endeavor.
Date: 2007-07-10 19:31:27