Our flip house journey began on a beautiful spring day, a year ago in May. My husband and I are real estate investors purchasing long term buy and hold rental properties. We own three rental units, are building a fourth, and regularly on the lookout for additional ones that fit our criteria while providing an appropriate, limited risk cash flow percentage. As newlyweds we house hacked our way into and then out of a 3000 square foot home, promptly remodeling it into a duplex, and then building an off-grid cabin to move into so that we could rent out both sides of the duplex. A flip house was not in our vision or scope, and it certainly didn’t fit our “plan”. To be honest, rather like the title, it flipped our world upside down.
The Beginning…
A little background is probably appropriate at this point to help build context for this leap. My husband and I are ordinary folks, loving Jesus, loving life, seeking to wisely steward our time. To be honest, probably our top struggle as an investing real estate couple is prioritizing our time, and like many folks, we tend to say “yes” to too many things, promptly limiting our ability to say “yes” to the right things. Two years ago, we purchased a rental property that needed some tremendous work. With a seven-month-old in tow, we managed to remodel that rental but just barely. Decent cash flow *often* looks bright and shiny until the cost is realized upon a marriage, home, and family. The hours we clocked away doggedly working on that rental did take their own toll, and we counted the cost dearly.
We decided that enough was enough, and we were not willing to continue our investment journey at the cost of our peace and sanity. We had seen that played out too many times by well-meaning couples seeming to lose the eternal things in their lives in the pursuit of more. However, we couldn’t shake the niggling suspicion that maybe somewhere out there we could find a better system.
Shout out to my amazing husband who is both cautious to charge into things, fact-checking and testing new sources while being an excellent researcher. He uncovered Dustin Heiner’s book: How to Quite Your Job with Rental Properties, A Step-by-Step Guide to Retire Early with Rental Properties and Passive Income (Check it out at, Amazon.com: How to Quit Your Job with Rental Properties Starter Guide: The Starter Guide to Investing in Real Estate eBook : Heiner, Dustin: Kindle Store). This book was a life changer for us, helping us realize that to sustain our real estate investment vision, we had to implement systems. So, we started. We needed a team, and we slowly pieced one together. We got our finances in order. We found an amazing handyman. We furthered our relationship with our incredible real estate agent. We had a contractor/inspector on standby. We continued investing in the professional relationship with our lender, and we waited.
The Flip House Opportunity
Cue the music… Our opportunity came, seemingly out of nowhere. I remember my husband calling me about the property after he had just gone and looked at with our agent. (Man! It was A MESS! I mean, a serious mess, but we’ll talk about that in a minute.) We discussed the project.
It was set up to be mutually beneficial, and it had the makings of a perfect deal. We were wise enough to know from our past experience, however, that the cost often comes in unexpected ways.
The house was a divorce situation, and the owner needed to get out from under it. It had been offered on before and then rescinded due to the amount of work it would take to get it livable. The house had been used to store 13 animals, and although I enjoy pets as much as the next person, the living conditions within the house were so bad that my husband wouldn’t even let me set foot inside to look at it. That was probably a good thing, considering I was pregnant with our second child.
I have to admit that I was scared. The toll of the last property acquisition, the year before, had been intense and pricey on our time and marriage! I wasn’t sure that we would be able to handle another, but we decided to try one more time. We had the team in place, and we set up proper boundaries to protect our time and marriage. We committed to a house flip in four days, that I would do the majority of the work with our handyman during the day (after ozoning like crazy), and my husband would finish it off. We committed to having it back on the market almost immediately. Sounds crazy, am I right?
The Flip House offer…
We put in a cash offer $50,000 BELOW asking price. It was a tough offer. Our agent put it in as a soft, verbal offer so that we wouldn’t offend the owner. (Offense was not our goal, but in order for it to cash flow with low enough risk to make it worthwhile and safe for us, we had to offer low enough to cover the tremendous amount of cost ahead of us.) Within a few hours, the offer was absolutely accepted, zero counter. We couldn’t believe it, and even though we were excited at the opportunity to try again, we were also super overwhelmed! We entered escrow and closed with no hiccups. Then the real test faced us. Could we do it in such a way that our expectations would be met and the cost wouldn’t be too high? Could we do the impossible? We prayed for God’s hand in it, took a deep breath, and hit the ground running…
Check out Flip House Part 2, coming March 27th for the rest of the story, here at https://purposefullyput.com
Some Amazing Resources
If you are looking for some information and advice on real estate investing, check out Dustin Heiner at, https://masterpassiveincome.com/.
Home inspectors are incredible people to have on a real estate team, and we highly recommend, https://www.kandkhomeinspections.com/.
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