The Master has failed more times than the beginner has tried

[Clayton Tinkler]

I was wondering if any more experienced members would be willing to share their stories about flips gone wrong, mistakes a beginner might make during the rehab, and stories about problems they have overcome to reach success? 

[CK Hwang]

Your post is perfect! I'm currently in the middle of a really crappy patch right now, and I'm no master, but I'm still willing to share my story of having gone wrong. 

So right now, I have 2 houses on the market that has taken 4 months to bring to market. If they sell at market, I would have effectively made $0 in profit, and it cost me roughly $1.4m all in. Talk about going nowhere fast. 

Oh where did it all go wrong? I started to become too trusting of 1 contractor, and the company jacked up the prices, did really poor quality jobs, took a really long time, such that by the time the houses hit the market and the escalation of costs, I've made no money. So from this I've learned that no matter how comfortable I get with a contractor, I need to constantly be bidding out jobs (admittedly I was getting lazy on this part) and constantly on the worksite monitoring quality. 

The upside to all this is that it has forced me to spend more time looking for better more efficient contractors that I can trust and I believe this will failure will lead the groundwork for better flips in the future. 

I think more than anything else that bums me out is that these properties were bought well and promised to have good profit margins, but due to my own laziness my lunch got eaten by someone else. Good deals with good margins are hard to find and when an opportunity like this is squandered, it hurts. 

Thanks for letting me vent.