Moving Houses For Profit

[Bryan Hancock]

Does anyone have any experience to share with moving houses? I am considering purchasing a house worth a significant amount of money and moving it to another lot in a zip code nearby. Any words of wisdom?

The story with the current project is that a fix and flip crew ran out of money on the house. The house is in pretty good shape and the new buyer is going to build a custom home on the lot so it will get torn down at a cost of around $3k or so. We're probably going to either get it for free or $500 or so. We'll move it to a $50k or so lot nearby and finish things out for $30k roughly. The house should hopefully sell for around $200k. Of course there are some transport costs that we are working on with an experienced house mover that depend largely on whether or not the house needs to be stored and the distance.

Thoughts? Opinions? Words of wisdom ;-)

[Don Konipol]

I did just that in the late 1970s. Move needs to be close by or transportation costs, city/county fees, etc will eat you up. Also, you must disclose the move to buyer. I found this eliminated 90% of potential buyers, the ones remaining wanted large discounts. After we moved three homes we found the profitability to be much less than anticipated, and decided to terminate this business. Problem with doing a one of is that your most costly learning experiences occur on the first one, so there are no second and third deals to absorb the learning cost of deal 1.