How weather affects your business model in oregon or washington
I wanted to give a call out to all those investors/flippers in the Pacific Northwest about weather and their business model. This will be my first winter up here and I'm trying to get an understanding of how the rain impacts the lineup, timeliness, and execution of your contractors. Is it just too wet for painters to get to the exterior of a place? It seems like the weather could add some considerable lag time, does anyone have any statistics on how much more time their flips take in the winter vs. the summer?
That is a good question. Though I don't flip, I do rehab. I honestly don't do much exterior work in the winter unless I have to. Especially painting. As the temperature drops it takes longer and longer for it to dry & it makes more of a mess. Coordinating painters is gong to depend a lot on the weather. It could take a couple months until a day worth painting on comes around. Though i can def. see a advantage to getting a couple flips finished during the winter months so they will be ready for the buying season. I can say the buying pretty much dries up around the end of October and doesn't pick back up until the end of march/april. that has been my experience from watching the MLS over the last 3 years.
Maybe you could get all other work finished during the winter, then list the property un-painted and offer the option of the buyer choosing their paint colors. Just a thought
That's exactly what I was afraid of. The notion of basing an investment business around a limited season is alarming. I don't want holding costs to go through the roof because of the weather, but I also don't want to limit marketing activities and purchasing properties to just the favorable weather months.
In my experience it seems that there's a really interesting psychological component of how weather warps people's thoughts and plans. When summer comes around people seem to start making all these grandiose plans to get outside fix the garage, paint the house, put in new concrete, build an ADU, or install whatever it may be. By fall, though, those plans either never materialized or were never finished and completion is pushed off. It just seems too slippery a slope to base a business model around this same mentality.
Exterior work becomes difficult - roofs, landscaping, painting, and foundations/basement. Mainly painting and wet basements. I spend most of the winter being an amateur meteorologist and pissing my painters off by constantly scheduling and rescheduling them. Or standing around in wet basements wondering what to do.
You can still get work done and sell houses in the winter. Just a few more issues to deal with.