Trying to Jump In - a possible condo flip

[Izumi Tanaka]

Hello Folks,

I am a newbie in Los Angeles, and this is my very first post! I awoke to the concept of REI a few months ago, discovered BP for a little over a month, became a pro a couple of weeks ago, have been reading, listening, watching lots of materials here (which by the way are awesome!), and went to a local meeting last weekend. I'm pretty shy, so I haven't participated in the forum yet, but here I go!

I've been around real estate business for almost 17 years as my husband is a real estate agent for almost 30 years, but believe or not we never considered investing per se until we had a rude awakening recently.  Don't ask me why.  I've purchased properties 2 times in my life. The first one I ended up selling at a loss simply because I was young and didn't have the perspective.  The second one is a vacation home we bought in 2005, and the value has not come back to what we bought it for while it is generating some revenue from vacation rentals.

My primary interest is flipping as I'm very much into designs and architecture, but my long term goal is to have multi-family units to generate cash flow so we can retire and do the things we're passionate about such as traveling and teaching. 

While I'm educating myself as much as possible, a situation showed up in the building we live.  It is a 10-unit building (YB1961), which was converted to condos in the '80s.  There is a vacant unit 2 doors down from ours where unfortunately the neighbor passed away.  The out-of-town owner of the unit is trying to turn it around to rent it again. The unit is in such a shamble that it would require some pretty good make-over just to make it decent enough to be rentable, and the owner is not willing to spend more than a few thousand dollars. If he can't rent it, he may resort to sell.  There's more detail to the situations, but bottomline I'm wondering if this could be an opportunity for my first flip worth enough to look into.

We've pulled comps and used the BP calculators and got some numbers. If anyone familiar/experienced with condo flipping, I would really appreciate some input!