If At First You Don't Succeed...

Haven't we all seen those house-flipping shows and thought, "I could do that"? Well, I've seen just about all of those shows and I know I thought it looked easy. That's what I get for thinking!

My first experience with house-flipping was in 2005 and it was a disaster with a capital D. A good friend of mine (Cassandra) and I decided that we would buy a house, remodel it during the summer (she's a school teacher), then turn around and sell it for a profit. That's the way they do it on TV after all. Surely it couldn't be that hard. We even realized that we didn't have all the necessary skills so we brought in a third partner (Jimmy) that would do/oversee all the remodeling work.

We picked a house in Cypress, TX that was a foreclosure and needed quite a bit of cosmetic work but nothing structural. Maybe we're just hopeless optimists but we figured we could get the work done in a month for about $10,000. I won't get in to all the gory details, but let's just say that it ended up taking 6 months and costing over 3 times what we expected. By the time we were ready to sell it, the real estate market in Cypress (suburb of Houston) had started to tank and we were competing with a bunch of low-priced foreclosures. Selling it for a profit was out of the question so renting seemed like the best option. Not so much! The renters had to be evicted after 8 months for non-payment of rent and to top it off, they had trashed the place. It took another couple of months to fix it up...again! I've never been so sick of a house before in my life! If I could have gotten away with burning it down, I would have. At this point, we just wanted to be rid of it so we settled for selling it for a loss. To the tune of about $25,000.

Now, a sane person would say, "Maybe house-flipping isn't for me." But, I've never been accused of being particularly sane. So, here I go again. This time I don't have any partners...it's just me, myself and I. And that's OK with me. I bought a house 20 minutes from my house instead of one that's over an hour away. I've actually got professionals doing the work this time (thank God!) and I'm just overseeing most of the work. There are still some things I will do myself and that's for 2 reasons. First, if it's something I can actually do, I'd rather save the money on labor. And second, I want to put my own personal touch on the place. I have to admit that it's so much nicer to have someone else do the work. Probably because deep down inside, I'm lazy. :)

I'd say the house is probably 1/3 complete now and I'm hoping that it will be finished by the middle of June. I'm so much more realistic this time about how much it will cost, how long it will take, and how much I can make on it. Hey, at least I learned something from my last adventure.

You can see both houses at my website: http://www.cdjdolphinflippers.com