I started looking for houses to flip in northern NJ in Sept. 2014 with @Kevin Hill (an investor friendly real estate agent in North Jersey), after seeing a dozen or so houses and having a couple of offers fall through I managed to get a house in Dumont, NJ under contract.

The house was a vacant bank owned 4 bedroom, 2 bathroom house that needed a fair amount of work. It had been vacant for a couple of years and hadn't been properly winterized so all the pipes had burst, also both bathrooms and the kitchen were in need of serious updating and the boiler and hot water heater needed to be replaced.

I used a local contractor for the repairs and financed the purchase and rehab using a HELOC on my primary residence.

See before and after pictures for Virginia Ave here (www.nsw-properties.com/properties.html)

What did I learn?

1) "Trust but verify" - we ended up running into permit problems which held up the sale, my contractor didn't do a great job of pulling the required permits and I didn't question him, everything worked out in the end but it was harder than it needed to be

2) Schedule – the contractor I used wasn’t great at scheduling his time, things always took more time than they should have which resulted in delays

3) Cost overruns – I was very conservative on my estimates for pretty much everything so it all worked however we did run into some surprises (active termite infestation, unplanned stucco requirements)

And now the numbers...

purchase price - $220,000.00

closing costs - $5,908.20

rehab - $58,030.00

holding costs - $13,649.02 (insurance, utilities, taxes, financing)

commission on sale - $17,150.00

sale price - $343,000.00

Total Profit - $28,262.78!

Next up is another flip that is already underway and should be complete in April, also as of yesterday I have a 2-family rehab under contract in Passaic, NJ, plan there will be to BRRRR (great strategy @Brandon Turner).

@Kevin Hill

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1st flip done, more to come...

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