It's our second flip. First one was a breeze compared to this one, I'm pretty sure we are going to lose money and it will take a long time because we will have to do cash for a lot of it. We plan to buy and hold though (first house we sold, which I still kick myself for), so hopefully over the long run it will make up for it. I plan on hiring an electrician... I just got a lot of greif from my husband about it and was wondering... Is having a general contractor run the wires a standard thing to do?! I guess not based on the responses on the thread!
Most people flipping houses I would think act as their own general contractor and do the work they can and sub out what they can’t or what code says they can’t, cutting out the middleman.
Around here it wouldn’t be real hard to find a licensed electrician that would take on a job like yours and use your labor as a helper type situation. It would not be you doing most of the work but more of him telling you here is the plan you cut the drywall and drill the holes, pull the wire and even mount the boxes and then he would do all connections etc. They would do it as a side job and maybe you would do the grunt work during the day and they would come in after their normal day and work another 4 hours. Expect to pay them well if you find such a guy and make the deal well in advance of starting yourself.
I know people in the trades and that opens doors for such side dealings, and they know and trust me and my work.
Jumping into flipping is not as easy as they make it look on a 60 minute TV show and at the end they say we made 60k profit. Most of those locations are not where most of us live and when a good flip does come up where we live the realtor grabs it or channels it to his buddy the contractor.
The house I’m living in was basically a flip I did and trust me it was on the market in distressed condition for two years and likely looked at by a dozen house flippers in the area and passed on. The reason they passed wasn’t that there wasn’t money to be made, but rather there wasn’t a market to sell it for what it would be worth if 30 miles away from its location. We had the advantage there because it was where we wanted to live and we didn’t plan on selling it. Location is 90% of it. Cheap homes are in areas people are not buying in mostly. Cheap homes that need a lot of work are getting passed on by the cheap ones that are move in ready. Most people don’t want a project.
In my little town most flips become rentals and lots of flippers want a big payout to move on to the next flip and don’t want the trickle payoff and the hassle of being a landlord.
