Let's hear your stories about flips. You know, "flip this house." Make the walls look all smooth by removing the cable connections. Cut the camera wires two feet above the DVR closet. Make the pipes look good for as far as the inspector is going to crawl under the house.

I've recently gotten two clients, some 50 miles apart, with the same vanilla marble floors and incredible houses that, upon a bit of inspection, are flips. Obvious flips. I now hate flips. I mean, flips as a genre were crap when one of my sons bought one and found that a drain connected to the kitchen sink dumped water onto the ground under the house, and then he had to spend a couple thousand dollars on a main drain to the street from the house. But now that I have two huge houses with marble floors AND NO WIRES COMING OUT ANYWHERE, I can truly say I hate all flips.

The first one has three dishes on the canyon side of the house. Two are antique and disconnected. The working one has only one feed in the entire two-story four bedroom house. That ONE is six feet above the floor in the dinette. At the other house, three Dish network guys were climbing, exclaiming, cursing, and scratching their heads trying to make the Dish system work. It even had a 12V power supply on it that didn't belong there.

And the one place where a cable can be traced to the headend n that house is fifteen feet from one end of the house and eighty feet from the other end. This is not the best place for the wifi modem! There is ONE, count 'em, ONE, data cable from that closet to the kitchen, so we're then forty feet into the house. But that cable is being used as an HDMI extension so the 16 cameras can be observed. Of course, the mouse doesn't work at that distance....

I could go on. Let me boil it down: I HATE FLIPS. Fortunately, I'm not the only person telling the homeowners that they are just not going to believe what it will cost to get things done in these houses!

The problem for many home buyers looking at these houses, they have no idea it is a Flip.
If they did and they were smart, then they would know the house has been 'duck taped' together and will require major repairs to fix what these idiots have done.

One thing we can do here in this state, is look up property records. If you see the current owner has only had the place a year or two and their selling point is the nice remodel they have done, that is a clear RED FLAG!
I would start negotiating lemon prices with them, which would surely piss them off and they will look for the next sucker to sell to.


All this is not to say however, that there are not good contractors out there that are buying houses and fixing them up right to sell them. But it seems to be more rare.
Instead of nice Mike Holmes, you get dumba$$ Texas Flip and Move.

One of my customers recently bought a condo on speculation. As part of the pre purchase due diligence he brought me in along with with the home inspector to scope out the A/V and network situation. I was impressed with the home inspector who pointed out a lot of little details that might nag the new owner. Some needed to be part of the pre sale negotiation, others were just a nag.

In this case wires were not cut by the agent or previous owner, but they were rudely stuffed back into the wall. I hope that they didn't damage the HDMI cable.

I feel your pain. We had 2 clients purchase flips last month and a half. A $1.8 million 4500sq ft single level w/ a flat roof and a $1 million 3500sq ft with a semi-open attic. Not a single wire was run in either house. In-ceiling speakers in a couple of locations that didn't work. On the flat roof home we had to run conduit on the roof to get basic wiring in for Directv and internet. The home with attic space wasn't bad but it had 1960s insulation in the attic. DirecTV and Cox guys refused to run the wiring in the attic so we were lucky enough to have the task assigned to us. It seems the flippers just slap drywall over anything they don't want to deal with.

Worst "flip" thing I saw was while looking at houses at the beach.


Doofus flipper real estate agent, and her "contractor" husband (a handyman that wasn't very handy apparently) had painted the vinyl siding with house paint.

It didn't look good and there's no way it will hold up.


I didn't even bother going inside.



It's sad that otherwise, seemingly intelligent people, think they can do this stuff just because they saw it done on TV.

I am doing a massive remodel on a place i own. not really a flip because i plan to live in it about three years but its a lot of work and a lot of money to do things the right way. I am not half ass'in anything and that adds lots of time and extra budget. The shit I'm running into... for example one section of the subfloor was rotted and someone put another subfloor down OVER CARPET. Then they let their dog piss on that... the carpet underneath gets wet and stays wet and rots everything. Tore it down to the frame in hallway, bath, master bedroom replacing subfloors. People amaze me. Rather then spending a couple hundred fixing roof leaks they let it get to that. Like wtf is wrong with people. I literally paid next to nothing for the place and it's all DIY, not paying a contractor for anything but i dropped 20 grand in about 10 seconds and lots more to go. When its done it'll be beautiful inside. Nice laminate floors, quality carpets, tile bath floor and a wicked tile shower i did with recessed niche and ceramic corner shelf. Glass door. It's gorgeous. Kitchen will receive a full remodel as well. In the end i'll learn a lot. Already have learned a ton. Might make a small profit. Would i do it again. Hell no. Way too much labor. More then i realized walking into it but i'll know better next time. I have been working solid in almost all my spare time since sept and still a ton left to do. It'll be a year easy before its done. That is a long time of having no life outside of work and work at home. I don't regret doing it. The learning experience is worth it and it's not costing me a lot of live month to month. Plus i can do things my way and inside it looks super modern in the area's i've finished...and of course loaded up with home automation goodies. But this kind of remodel again.... not a chance. There are much better ways to make $. Especially when you have a hard time half a$$ing things. It just costs you too much. The amount of cob job work i have encountered just scares me. The electrical... wow. Amazing the place didn't burn down.

You better take a lot of pictures (before/after) and document everything you do.

The average home buyer is a cheap skate and doesn't care about anything except cheap price and that it 'looks' pretty. Selling to one of these types will certainly result in a negotiation to a price you loose money.
You'll want to market to someone who cares and is looking to pay to have something done right. Might sit on the market for awhile to find the right buyer but your pictures & documentation will go a long way to land that client when they find you.

My favorite flippers...

Chip Gaines for President. He is hilarious. I want to move to Waco JUST so I can meet them and have them reno a house for us.

Some of it depends on the market and how tight the margin will be. But usually the places where they know they will get top dollar return in the kitchen and baths with wife wows they go big. Like the train wreck Vegas flippers on tv. But it seems no matter the size of house they never put any budget for tech because they don't think it helps sell and if they don't put in tech they think why spend money on wires? Everything is wireless these days right? The only one on TV I see do tech and sell the husband wows is Vanilla Ice. But he is such a douche nozzle it is hard to watch.

Also just having sold a house I know that the inspectors nowadays are so afraid of being sued they will call out EVERYTHING big or small even if it was not code at the time the house was built. For instance my inspector called out my 1980 built house since there was no AFCI and the GFCI was not in all locations required by the current code. Uhh yeah, no kidding it was built in 1980!

fortunately these guys are NOT flippers - the build for other people - just start with a rough shell.
they are about an hour from me. The whitest teeth in texas..

now there is that other Cali couple with the cute skinny blond and the lucky husband who are now on the road doing "flipping" seminars - that is where the REAL money is.

then we have the fortunate past of the Montelango brothers who could not stick 2 turds together with duct tape. Glad they went away finally.
they were doing seminars and even the City of Austin put out a warning on these clowns and what a scam they were.

Too bad Waco is a shithole of a town. CONSTANT news reports of crime, murders, theft,etc. Its 30 miles away. You couldnt pay me to live there. Its a toss of of which is worse, Waco or Killeen. Both are always top headlines for the latest mishaps.

The worst is the new show "First Time Flippers". It shows how "flippers" who know nothing buy a house and then expect to flip it in 8 weeks and make $120K.

It is kinda funny how some know absolutely nothing about construction and they are ripping out walls, pipes and electricity. They find problems and most don't fix the problem they just patch it up so it won't be seen.

To see them hang cabinets is hilarious. About once a show you will see one of them step on a nail because they are working in tennis shoes.

But, the sad part is that they sell the house to someone who is not aware of the problems that they found and the new owners will then have to fix those problems which should have been fixed by the "flippers".

The name "Waco" is a great example of a word in one language being spelled differently to get the right pronunciation by speakers of another language.

Waco, pronounced "way-coe," is an Anglicized spelling of "hueco," a Spanish word that seems to characterize the place pretty well. It means, variously:
hole
empty, or empty place
gap in one's schedule
pothole
queer*
superficial
empty (as in "without ideas")



*spanishdict.com

But see this is where these 'scripted' shows fall apart. If this was real, they could sue the f^ out of the idiot who did this. And they would have no chance, since it is was all very well documented.
I'm not a real estate agent but I know I have heard a lot over the years about the laws surrounding this kind of thing. There is no way that show is real - 100% fake. Either that or there are a lot of idiots loosing everything in court right now.