Flip House #6: How Did We Find It? AND a 'Before' Video Walk Through

It took us a while to close on flip house #6, but we are hoping it is well worth it!

If you would have told me 5 years ago that I would be flipping houses with six kids in addition to my nursing career, I would have told you that you were crazy. Well, here we are– doing just that.

How Did We Find Flip House #6??

In the current housing market it is TOUGH to find an investment property to flip. If the house is listed, you are most likely already too late. We have not had a project house of our own since January, however not for lack of trying. I put in offers slightly over list with ALL CASH and was still outbid! Well GRRR!!

So how do you think we found this property?? Well….through our amazing realtor!! She sent out over 100 letters to various home owners in our surrounding area of homes that appeared to need some work. Now I have no idea what this letter said, but out of all of them, two people responded. She contacted one of them and set up a time for us to go and look at his property.

We rolled up a week or so later in my suburban with all of the kids in tow. Many people find it hard to believe that we do what we do, but we made a commitment to send our kids through Christian education and this is going to pay for that. When we arrived, the look of disbelief when we kept unloading more and more children was priceless (it always is). I introduced our entire family to the owner who was simply in awe of everyone.

Yes, we are a family of 8 and we work hard—- together.

Making an Offer

We pretty much knew we wanted this property the minute we left, however, the numbers had to make sense. My realtor scoured the MLS to put some comps together because the seller did not have an asking price. He has owned the property since 1966 and well…prices have changed a bit since then. 🙂

After determining how much money we would put into it, what it would sell for, and less the fees and approximate carrying costs of the property, we came up with our offer. I always feel that when making an offer, it helps the seller to understand where your number came from. We submitted our comps as well as a list of repairs needed and approximate cost.

DEAL!!

Waiting and waiting and waiting to close….

The property is a two family huge historic home….occupied by two tenants. Long story short, it took one of them forever to find somewhere else to live and the eviction processes was started. The one lady was out in time, however, the other lady…not so much. Once she finally found a place to move to she did not have much in the way of help. We felt bad since she is in her 70’s, and the landlord being in his 80’s so… guess what? VH Homes Moving Company to the rescue!

We recently purchased this large enclosed trailer (thanks to my brother Doug for finding it!) that is like new to haul our tools and all of my staging furniture. Well its first use… moving out the last tenant so that we could close!! She had SO MUCH STUFF!!!! My husband and I as well as my realtor AND her husband spent most of our time over the course of four days moving her out. Again….who has the most amazing realtor!?!?

Closing could finally be scheduled!!!!

Closing Day!

Last week Wednesday we finally closed!!! Now this is not my first rodeo when it comes to closings (obviously), yet a ‘first’ happened. After I signed the last of the papers, the seller joined me in the closing room to hand over the keys….and boy did he!!!

He had saved every key since purchasing the house in 1966!