Home Inspection

The Home Inspection:

• Hire a professional inspector to come through and look at the property.
• “Even experienced flippers hire them once in a while.”
• I’d recommend actually, physically doing the inspection with the inspector, and ask a lot of questions. The information you learn will serve you for years to come as you pursue flipping houses with more efficiency.
• A home inspection typically runs between $400 and $600 for a typical single family home, and higher for multifamily properties. Again, this is no place to skimp.
• A home inspector’s job is to find problems, so don’t be scared when you get a 20 page list of problems. I’ve never purchased a property that didn’t have at least 50 things on that list to be fixed. No property is perfect, and if you wait for the perfect property, you’ll be waiting a long time. Instead, you want to find properties that have no major problems (roofs, foundations, etc.) and/or budget to fix everything up.
• Keep in mind, this is a great negotiation tool.
• After the inspection, you will have 1 of 3 choices:
• Accepting the condition and moving on with the sale,
• Rejecting the condition and walking away from the deal
• Renegotiating the deal
• Obviously if everything looks good, move forward and sign a document letting the seller’s know you accept the condition.
• But what if there are serious, game-changing problems?
• Creating your scope of work
• Although this step could be completed before the offer is accepted:
• I do a “light” version so I don’t waste time on deals that won’t ever happen.
• I wait until after the property inspection. Another benefit of this is that the property inspection will essentially give you a detailed scope of work.
• If you are not comfortable with doing the work yourself, be sure to bring a qualified contractor with you to bid out these tasks.