Flipping Houses vs. Flipping Land: A Financial Comparison

I’ve never been a big fan of really long blogs. 

I like the USA Today / 8th grade version of things in general.  

Here’s a side by side comparison of Flipping Houses vs. Flipping Land.  It's seems pretty clear which one works best (maybe a combination of both could work).

I put this up on Google Docs so you can see it in a spread sheet and plug in your own numbers. The link is here.

If you want your own spread sheet to play with, just email me and I'll send you a fresh copy.

Here's the summary:

Flipping Land turns a 300% Profit Margin.

Houses turn about a 35% margin.

If I had 100,000, I could turn it into $300,000 in land.  In houses I could turn it into $135,000.

Aside from the clear financial benefits, here's a few other points to consider:

- Land needs no attention, houses need to be renovated and maintained.

- You can burn down your land and it holds the same value.

- You can buy land in all 50 states from where you are sitting right now, houses need to be "walked through" and managed.  You don't need to go see land.

- The only carrying cost with land are the annual taxes (most of the time).  There are too many carrying costs to list here with houses.  

- My 6th grader gets it.  He has seen us in both businesses and he prefers land flipping because he knows I will pick him up after school if we are not flipping houses.

- Land is much easier to buy and sell.  There's tons of unwanted rural properties available and ready for negotiation which allows you to sell it for much less to the end user.

- There's no competition when buying land.