While most people think of house flipping as a high-risk, high-reward form of speculative investment, the reality is that it has been a very real career for many people. Flipping homes, if done correctly, can become a legitimate and sustainable career path for anyone who’s willing to put in the time and work necessary to make it one. Here are four of the top ways you can make a career in house flipping.
Set realistic expectations
Misrepresentation as a path to getting rich quickly keeps many people from considering house flipping as a legitimate career path. Stories of people doubling their money or even more on home flips may be accurate, but they are by far the exception rather than the rule.
If you want to forge a career path in flipping, you need to have realistic goals instead of believing the hype. If you realise a return of 20 percent on a home, you’ve completed a successful flip. Don’t reach for extravagant returns, as this will make it much harder for you to succeed.
Focus on volume
One of the challenges of being a house flipping investor is the fact that long-term success requires a large volume of houses to flip. Unless you live in a large metropolitan area, you’ll need a much better system than simply looking for homes that are already on the market.
Advertise and actively seek out motivated sellers who you can help to get out of their homes quickly. Flip or flop seminars can often be helpful with this stage of the flipping business, as it can teach you how to find leads on a regular basis.
Build an estate team
One of the best ways to transition house flipping into a legitimate career is to build up a professional team to help you streamline the process. Having people to find leads, cultivate sellers and close sales can leave you free to focus on the core business areas of choosing properties and overseeing their rehabilitation.
Though this path will increase your capital costs, it will also greatly increase the volume of properties you will be able to flip in any given period of time. Having such a team also gives you the flexibility to expand into areas outside of your immediate local area, which can even further increase the volume of properties you can handle.
Create a capital reserve
When people first get into house flipping, they often put almost all of the free capital they have into it. While this may be necessary at first, you should start building up a base of capital in your flipping business as soon as possible.
The purpose of this reserve of money isn’t to buy more houses, but to be able to take care of expenses during periods in which you don’t have any money coming in. If you want your house flipping to turn into a legitimate career, you need to be able to keep it going, regardless of whether or not you’ve recently liquidated one home to begin work on the next.
If you’re willing to take it seriously and put in the work needed to transform it into a real business, house flipping can become a very legitimate career path for you. Despite the get-rich-quick hype that’s sometimes attached to it, the business of investing in homes, rehabbing them and selling them for a profit can make you a very respectable living.
If you get into house flipping, you can also choose to branch out into other forms of property investing, such as being a landlord. Diversifying your business will take time, but it can also help you to more easily build a career.
Are you a house flipper? How did you start out? Let us know your experiences in the comments below.
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