Finding Your Contractor

[Juan Diaz]

Finding your contractor is a crucial part of the remodeling process. For cosmetic flips you’ll largely be focused on finding some skilled craftsmen to do painting, repairs, and perhaps some texture. Your more extensive flips will require a general contractor that’s able to fix multiple areas of the house. For both, the process is the same.

You begin by taking that bid sheet that you created previously that lists all of the repairs you need done, item by item. You’ll need to invite the craftsmen or contractors over to your flip to go over the repairs and give you a bid.

But how are you going to find the contractors to bid on your work? Most flippers rely on long-term relationships that have built up over years of working together with a reliable contractor, and as a beginner you’re going to have to approach finding a contractor in such a way that maximizes your odds of finding a good potential partner. That means putting in the effort to undertake a comprehensive search. More work now means less work later trying to repair the shoddy workmanship done by some contractor that you hired off the street.

There are multiple avenues to use when looking for a general contractor. The primary avenue in many locations is actually Craigslist, with many GCs lurking on the gigs section looking to sniff out construction work. Just post “licensed general contractor wanted” in the gigs section. Yelp in many locations is also an easy way to find GCs, just search “general contractor” in your city. Houzz.com is another good site to find licensed GCs.

Remember as you’re looking for your contractor what you’re looking for: 1) Price, and 2) quality. There are many contractors out there that will do a fantastic job, but charge too much for your budget. There are a few that will have a fantastic price, but will not do sufficient-quality work. Your job is to find the GC that will perform work that fits with both your price and quality needs.

However, going into your first flip you’re not likely to know what things will cost. That’s why you have your detailed bid sheet, and desired timeline. What you can do in getting bids for the first time is to have the contractors come, walk the site, and give you a bid and timeline for each of the items that you discussed. Getting those bids and timelines should give you a good idea what the market value is for the construction that you’re doing. As you’re getting those bids, make sure to let them know that you’re starting up a flipping business, and if they get the job and do well, it could mean a lot of business for them in the future.

After your GCs will come and give you bids for all the work that needs done on your property, you should ask for pictures of construction jobs that they’ve taken on. By seeing the level of finish that they are able to accomplish, you should get a sense for the quality of their work. Pictures of one or two job sites is really all that you need.

The other element that you’ll need use to check the contractor’s reputation is a set of references on jobs that they’ve completed. Two or three reference names and phone numbers should be plenty here. When your contractors have come and given you a quote, along with pictures and references, you’ll need to go through the references of your top few contractors, calling up the references to make sure that a) the contractor’s work was timely, b) they did a good job, c) there were no major price disputes, and d) that they were easy to get along with.

After you’ve looked at pictures, checked references, and compared prices to make sure that you’re as informed as possible about your contractors, you need to narrow the field down to your top 3 contractors. If there’s a contractor out there whose price is just a little bit too high, you’ve got a chance to still use the contractor. Contractor-given prices are like used-car sticker prices—there’s always room to negotiate. Take the lowest price from among your preferred contractors, and call up your too-high contractors. Let them know that you’d love to use them, but that their price was too high. You’re on a tight budget, and you can only use them if they can match the price that this other contractor gave. Remind them that this is also a chance to get consistent work. Usually most contractors will match the price, but if they do not, that’s fine as well. You’ve got your best alternative elsewhere.