Hey all,

This is my first post on here. I was brought here after reading "The Book on Flipping Houses" (haven't quite finished it yet, but it's great!) and I am currently in search of my first flip. Yesterday I toured a potential property, and after seeing it inside and speaking with the listing agent, I confirmed that the house will need a lot of work to get top dollar on the re-sale. However, I might be able to make a profit if I can get them to agree to a lowball offer and then rehab the place just enough to re-sell at a slightly less than top tier price point. When I think of flipping, I always think of trying to rehab a house to get it into that top tier resell value. I was wondering if anyone out there has ever attempted this kind of "half flip" as I guess you could call it, and if it is a bad idea to try something like this on my first flip. Any advice is appreciated. Thanks!

There is more art than science to this.  Your goal should be to improve the property to a level expected by buyers in your market.  Can you make money with paint and spackle only?  Maybe.  It depends on the property and market.  Remember that sales costs will weigh heavily on your margin as you go out of the deal.   

What you are saying is why you should not just finish the first book, but also spend a year in local REI meetings, meeting people and understanding how it really works. Your first hope is pinned on a lowball offer and half-doing a flip? Not realistic and doesn't make sense to half-flip a property. If you are turning out a rental on a flip, you can go lighter, but doing a flip just to scrape by seems ludicrous. What happens when you flip a property and it is incomplete is that all buyers think you ran out of money, were cheap or found issues and are hiding them. Keep learning, but this is not a good strategy. Most markets are hot so lowballs aren't working and when you are new and there is a property sitting on the market for a long time, you have to ask yourself why all the seasoned investors passed on it.

Thanks for the kind words on the book!

When I do any real estate project, I analyze MULTIPLE exit strategies. And that includes analyzing multiple flip strategies.

I'll run the numbers as a wholesale deal (where I literally resell it to another investor without doing ANYTHING). 

I'll run the numbers as a wholetail deal (where I just do some minor cleanup or fix one major issue and resell to another investor). 

I'll run the numbers as a low-end flip to a landlord.

I'll run the numbers as a retail flip using low- to mid-level finishes. 

I'll the run the numbers as a high-end flip, using high-end materials. 

I'll run the numbers as a tear-down and rebuild.

I'll run every scenario that I can think of that might make sense. The rehab numbers will change, the ARV will change, the holding costs (based on the holding time) will change. And at the end of the day, one or two of those scenarios will stand out as the best choice for that particular property.

One or two of those scenarios will generate the best profit, or create the least risk, or will optimize in some other way that makes sense for you and that deal.

And that's the strategy you should pursue.

What the master @J Scott said lol. What you are describing, I've heard called a "Wholetale". Basically a "good enough" flip to get a little more out of the property. If you get a good enough deal, you could also just sell it "as is" to another investor, in what people refer to as a wholesale without making a single change to it. You'd wanna run different scenarios to see what would make the most sense given your time, money, experience, network, and goals. But to answer your first question, yes, this is totally something you could do.