Anyone worked on a fire damaged property?

[Silvia Ochoa]

Hi, I have my eye on a fire damaged house going for 75k in an area that comps for 200k. The numbers look good but I have never dealt with a fire house. Walls and structure look good but the entire roof will need to be replaced including the rafters. And to make matters worse, it has been raining like crazy so I'm sure there will be water damage because of it. 

Please share your stories dealing with this type of situation. Like they say, "You don't know what you don't know". Any insight into what I can expect will help me make a better decision. Thanks.

[Ronald Starusnak]

Hey, I absolutely love doing burn damaged flips especially if the price is right. You can make some serious money by taking bigger risk. When factoring in your estimate make sure to consider your code office might make you upgrade the property to existing codes and not just match what was there.

For example I am finishing up some town houses that were fire damaged now and we had to upgrade the wiring to new code, change all insulation to R15 (old was R13), the sheet rock we replaced on ceilings seperating living spaces had to be double hung fire code 5/8", and the biggest was that when we re-framed the roof we could not copy the old rafters. We had to have an architect design new rafters and we had to build them in the new way.