Is House Flipping Right for You?

If you’re new to house flipping, you may be wondering if you’ve gotten in over your head. Flipping houses is an excellent way to make a living if you have a passion for it, but it’s not something that just anybody can pick up and be great at overnight. Just like any other profession, it has a steep learning curve and is best suited to certain strengths and personality types. If you want to be a great house flipper, here are five things you will need.

• 1.Time

This is the big one. Sure, you could plausibly flip houses on the weekends and make a fun hobby out of it, but you’re not going to make any real money that way, and you’ll likely have a very hard time finding worthwhile investment properties. To really make a go of flipping houses, it needs to be your full-time job. Many successful house flipping investors work sixty-plus hours a week, and that’s not even the flippers who do the construction themselves.

A word of caution – don’t quit your day job before you’re sure that you know what you’re getting into. A good way to get your feet wet is wholesaling properties. This can be done with much less capital and less time.

• 2.Strong Math Skills

Flipping houses isn’t about gut instincts or design sensibilities. Those things help, but the skill you need more than any other is math. Flipping houses is just one big math problem – weighing all the costs and risks against the potential returns. The better you do your research and learn the math that goes into choosing an ideal property at an ideal price with an ideal loan, the more successful you’ll be.

• 3.Attention to Detail

If you’re a big picture kind of thinker, that’s fine. You could still be a very successful house flipper, but you’ll need a partner who is very good at details. House flipping is the summation of endless spreadsheets, receipts, schedules, and contacts. You need to stay on top of all the nitty-gritty details, or you need to have someone on your team that you can trust with all that stuff. And be prepared to get out of that person’s way, because that person will be the boss on site, not you.

• 4.Networking

You’d be amazed how much a strong network can benefit you in the house flipping world. Making friends with other flippers, contractors, real estate agents, home owners, material suppliers, and all sorts of other people will make your job easier every day.

• 5.Dedication

Perhaps most importantly, house flippers need to be willing to put in the blood, sweat, and tears to see their flips through to completion. Everything is on a tight timeline with house flipping, and things always go wrong, so you need to be ready to roll up your sleeves and get to work at a moment’s notice. Again, if you want to flip houses as a hobby, you can be a bit laxer with your approach, but you can’t expect to make money that way.

What other skills do rehabbers share? Tell us the characteristics you find most important in your own house flipping investments.