The reason why We Gladly Lost $20,000 Flipping a Utah Fixer Upper House
In August of 2005, my real-estate business partners and I were flush with cash. We had just made $45,000 from having simply fixed up after which traded 2 mobile houses in St. George, Utah. The pleasure of earning a huge amount of cash so rapidly had gone to our heads. We thought we are unbeatable. We were about to learn the facts.
Right after the mobile homes had sold my partners and I began searching for next fixer upper which we might flip. I wanted to switch up into flipping pricey homes, thinking that we could earn more funds that way.
I was aware of a foreclosed house for selling in Santa Clara. Santa Clara is a small city, just outside of St. George.
The lending company had the house had been for sale for about 2 yrs with no takers. It absolutely was a Santa Fe design, luxurious house built in 2002. The house was 3000 sq. ft., had wonderful views, slate tile throughout, a 3 car garage, 4 bedrooms, 4 bathing rooms and tons of improvements throughout.
The home was incomplete and had never been rented. It absolutely was clear that the contractor had run out of cash before he might complete the house and sell it. The kitchen was unfinished. The tile was cracked here and there from settling. The closets were totally incomplete. The garden was a assortment of weeds, mud and boulder sized rocks.
During the time which we viewed the home, St. George was wrapping up on an amazing run up in home prices, about a 1% increase in house values every week for months. My associates and I were aware that the demand would decelerate sometime in the future, still what we didn’t know once we bought the house, was that the market slow down had already started.
Well, we made an recognized, full price offer for the Santa Clara home ($395,000). We made the whole cost offer for the reason that there was yet another purchaser which was negotiating with the financial institution to purchase the house at the same time we were. We thought we could make money on the home and we needed to be sure that we were the buyers the lending company chose to buy the house.
We ended up purchasing the home for $395,000. We also financed our closing costs, making our home mortgage amount to $400,000.
After the purchase, we invested $15,000 into repairing the garden, approximately $4,000 into finishing the closets and another $6,000 in many other fix up / finishing costs.
We placed the house back for sale, just about instantly upon buying it, for $525,000. We really considered it might sell rapidly for this amount once we were done repairing it up. The home was for sale the whole time we were repairing it.
After the repairs were done, the home sat on the market for a few months. The St. George real estate property market had ground to some halt throughout the time we were repairing the home. We finished up having to make about $9,000 in mortgage loan payments while we nervously continued to wait for the home to market.
In March of 2006, seven months right after the purchase, we were starting to fearing because we weren’t certain we could make any longer mortgage payments. We didn’t desire to lose the house and our investment, however the home loan payments were eating us alive by this point.
We were pushed to little by little reduce our selling price until ultimately we had our asking price at $430,000. In March we breathed a sigh of comfort when the house finally went under agreement at this price.
We sold the house in April 2006. Our charges to sell were about $16,000 which includes the $12,000 commission that was dished out to the buyer’s agent.
Here’s what the closing tally on the fixer upper Santa Clara house was:
What we sold the house for………………….$430,000
Improve costs………………………………… -$25,000
Mortgage loan payments………………………… -$9,000
Commission paid…………………………… -$12,000
Settlement costs……………………………… -$4,000
What we paid for the home………………… -$400,000
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Total loss…………………………………… ($20,000)
We was feeling very lucky to have been able to sell an pricey home when our local real estate market was so bad. There are a lot of investors that bought at the top rated of the market who haven’t been so lucky; people who are stuck with homes that they can’t afford. These depositors are wondering if their houses will sell prior to they exhaust them to the financial institution.
Strangely enough we are in fact searching for another home to fix up. We are going to stick with mobile houses or condominiums and just lease them out. The message that we acquired is that the less expensive the fixer upper house is, the lesser risk there’s towards the sponsor.