For Jan, Feb and March I'm going to buy some houses; here's how..

[Hassan Omar]

Hey folks, happy new year.

The other day I was asked to show a friend all the steps required to find and buy a fixer upper house here in the Atlanta market. Not a hard task, but doing it the right way is. That said I decided to keep a little log of how things are going with the process. So if any of you are interested please follow along throughout the month as I make this thing work. Give me you thoughts if anything that I do doesn't make sense to ya. If any body else out there wants to run a parallel track in your market please do so everyone can see how well this works in different areas of the country. That said, Here goes nothing....

In addition to the wholesale deals that I provide to other investors, from time to time I actually do buy, repair and flip houses. Here in the Atlanta market I prefer to buy houses no more than 35 years old in the north and eastern suburbs, such as Lawrenceville, Snellville, Lithonia and Stone Mountain, GA. The reason that I do this is because in these areas the values tend to be reasonable stable, and the homes are modern with the basic amenities that home buyers (not renters) expect to see.

So for the purpose of this exercise I'll be looking for 3 - 5 bedroom homes with a minimum 2 full bathrooms and at least 1,200 square feet of livable space. I'm not too concerned on whether or not it has a basement, nor am I concerned with the size of the yard. I'm just looking for a deal that feels good to me. On more thing, I don't want to do too much work in the way of rehab, so we'll try to keep the repairs under $20k, which will basically be a house with cosmetic to cosmetic repairs.

My goal for this property is to be able to flip it within 3 to 8 months and to make a profit of at least $25,000 from the deal. I'll use a private lender to fund the deal, paying out somewhere between 10 - 15% in interest to the private lender or I'll partner with another investor with a profit sharing split. I'll find a private lender by calling list of contacts, networking and hitting up prior lenders.

I'll start by looking for properties on the MLS, on other investors websites, on craigslist, and by networking at the local real estate investor associations (REIA's) here in Atlanta, those being the Georgia Real Estate Investors Association, North Metro Reia, and IRCA-Atlanta. Hopefully I'll be able to find about 10 good candidates to look at so that I can get 5 to make offers on, so that I can close on the one I like. This house should have an after repaired value of between $100k to $180k and I'm going to have to get it cheap; about 30 - 40 cents on the dollar (ARV).

I'll have one of my contractors inspect it and one of my appraisers confirm the after repair value. Stay tuned to see how this goes....