Best Ways to Cut Costs on Rehabs
Hello all,
Although I am not new to BP, this is my first post. I am a real estate broker and a real estate investor. I run a traditional real estate team as well as buy, rehab and sell properties. Last year we bought, rehabbed and sold 6 properties without really trying that hard (by that I mean we found these 6 properties in the normal course of running our $10 Mil+ per year traditional real estate sales team). This year we have been purposeful in our planning and are going to do a minimum of 12 rehabs this year.
Enough about me, the reason I started this post is because I am very interested in the collective minds & experience of the many rehabbers on BP and how we can brainstorm & share different things we do to save money and reduce the costs with a rehab.
I believe we all have questions as learning based individuals on different ways we think that may help reduce the cost of our rehabs. For example, I wonder if I just knew exactly how to measure the roof and purchase the shingles for a roof if I could find a more "day laborer" rate installer.
What got me thinking about this is the fact that I am now on my 3rd roofer, not due to being unhappy with the other 2 but because I keep finding a consistently less expensive roofer and switching. My latest guy replaced a roof in Plano for me for $5,500 (30yr shingles) that I believe was something like 34 squares but needed 44 squares when considering waste (at least that's what my prior roofer told me before he ended up bidding that same roof out at $8,500 and lost). Now, it's important to note that my new roofer did nothing other than shop the shingle, purchase it and had one of his "day laborer" rate guy install it without as much as ever being in the same county of the house.
Is anyone already doing this on their rehabs? Can anyone help share with me and everyone else reading this how they get the cost down for roofs?
Also, let's not stop just at roofs. Does anyone have any insight and/or experience that they could share in regards to what they have done to make their rehabs cheaper? or Does anyone have any theories or hypotheses that they would like to share and have others shine some light on?
I really think that pooling together our collective experience can help everyone put more money in their pockets on each and every rehab.