Take Aways from 2024

[Wade Wisner]

I have owned a number of residential and commercial rental properties out of state and they have generally been good investments. Although management has always been the key to success or failure. I have been doing fix-n-flips throughout COVID, but I have always been in the market area to manage them. I was not finding viable local fix-n-flip candidates in my area and I had read a book from BiggerPockets on out of state property fix-n-flips. In that situation I purchased a SF property 4 hours away from me this year as a fix-n-flip and to test the hypothesis that long distance fix-n-flips could be viable investments. The property was a VA foreclosure of a 1970's brick rancher. The house was on a crawl space, which will become important later. Prior to losing the home in foreclosure the previous owner had retaliated against the lender by cutting out most of the exposed electrical wiring and removing the heat and air units from the property. I found a contractor through the listing realtor and he bid all of the work except the HVAC, which I located another subcontractor. The problems with the project mostly stemmed from the crawl space work, which required shoring, replacing structural members, leveling floors and insulation. Other problems resulted when the contractor did not identify in his bidding the missing wiring in the attic space (only the crawl space). Costs ran significantly over on both of these items and not being in the area it was not possible for me to add my experience in renovations to lowering them. I think that the biggest take-away for me in the project is to avoid crawl spaces - I am claustrophobic and hate to enter crawl spaces anymore. Otherwise, the work went OK, but the construction time ran significantly over. Most of my fix-n-flips are financially at least second base hits, or home runs, but this one was barely a base hit. I might do one again, but NO CRAWL SPACES ever.