The "Pershing & Bumby" Project - Getting our feet wet!

This was our very first fix n' flip. Looking back now, we didn't really know as much as we thought, but we had the basis covered. We purchased this property the beginning of February 2015 as a straight forward 'buy-rehab-sell in 3-4 months' project. It was a good deal! 

It closed at the very end of February and construction rehab began right away. The thing that we did not quite consider when buying this home, was that we were flying to New Zealand about a week later. A trip which had been planned, booked, and paid for about 9 months earlier to visit Mark's family; Mark is from New Zealand and all his family still lives there. His dad was 90 years old and declining in health. He has since passed away.

Now, we do not recommend to anyone to do this, but with rehab two weeks in of your very first fix & flip ever, we boarded a plane and flew half way around the world. We did have some friends who had promised to keep an eye on things while we were gone, but either way, it was a little bit of a scary situation. The time difference with New Zealand is 16 hours ahead of Florida and there is not a very wide spread of internet access available over there. We had to do some nifty planning to work our trips around places with internet and many of our nights in NZ were interrupted with calls and texts from our contractors.

All in all it worked out great though. By the time we came back in early April, the rehab was 99% finished - there were just some lose ends to tie up. The property looked great and we listed it a few days after on the MLS with our realtor. It had a lot of activity right away and we had it under contract in less than 30 days and it sold/closed three weeks later.

Even though it was not the ideal way to start off in your real estate career, it was a great learning experience and it worked!

After:                                                           Before:

After:                                                                 Before: