Well we finally finished the rehab on our first flip in Arlington, TX and listed today! Unsurprisingly, we were over budget and past schedule but are excited that the Dallas-Fort Worth market is so hot...we are hoping for a quick sale.

http://apps2.shoot2sell.net/gallery/mls/1602-brunson-ct-arlington-tx/

Location: Arlington, TX

Price Paid: $94K

List Price: $174,900

Repairs: $46K

Holding Costs: $5300

Anticipated Closing Costs: $4373

Buyer's Agent Commission: $5247

As you can see the numbers aren't great but not terrible at a full price offer. We did a lot of the work ourselves this time because this was the first project we have done together and we were learning about each other's work habits, styles, ethic etc. We intend to contract out all future work.

Lessons Learned:

1. Retaining walls are a beast. We planned on only replacing the front retaining wall and budgeted accordingly but ended up having to replace both due to further unforeseen structural issues. Couple that with Arlington's restrictions on repairing/replacing railroad ties and we were basically forced to install a new stone retaining wall, especially since some heights of the wall exceed 5 FT which required additional engineering requirements. Couple this with our 100 year flood type rainy season and we really lost a lot of time and money on this portion of the project. A ton of the yard washed away because the grass was all torn out from the retaining wall installation and so we tried to put sod in to counter some of that which backfired and washed away the soil beneath the sod. Half our yard ended up in front of our neighbors down the street and it took a lot of wheelbarrows to get it back.

Impact to Budget - $16K (additional cost of rear wall, sod, patio due to poor drainage from original retaining wall)

2. Doing the work ourselves probably cost us money and time. Despite the fact we deliberately decided to do the work ourselves we still got bids on the work to use as a reference point. We still used contractors for granite, flooring, paint/drywall and a handyman for a few punch list items. Doing this took us away from sourcing other deals, building our property management business and focusing on the things we want to do.

Impact to Budget - $0 I am going to say zero dollars economically but probably lost out on several business building opportunities which certainly has a cost though I will not attempt to quantify that here.

3. Systemization was in its infancy and it hurt us. We were using Evernote as our project management type app to share checklists, shopping lists, budgets etc. It worked great for the items we put on there but were not always consistent with uploading all the info and this cost us many trips and tons of time duplicating work that had already been done. We are creating systems for all of us to follow so that we grow deliberately and collaboratively in the easiest fashion possible.

Impact to Budget/Schedule - $2K/1 week

4. Standardization was one of the first things we realized we needed. Standard forms for budget estimates, work inspections, safety, contracts, scope of work, etc. This will take time but is something we are excited about executing well on.

Impact to Budget: Time will tell

5. Get as close to the source of the property as possible. We learned that the original wholesaler farmed it out to another wholesaler who up-charged the deal a second time. We ended up reaching out to build a relationship with both wholesalers and have already seen the benefits.

Impact to Budget: $7K

Well that is about it guys. I will post more pics of the before and after.

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