Hello BP!
My husband, @Luis Vellon, and I decided to move our growing family from Florida to Phoenix this year in March. He played poker professionally and I was an assistant principal, but we decided to embark on an adventure and take the plunge working together to start a real estate investment business. We are excited to see (and hope!) that many of the skills that made us successful in those areas are transferable to our real estate investment.
We created our company, Sweet Nickel Investments, and read @J Scott's The Book on Flipping Houses and The Book on Estimating Rehab Costs. What an incredible resource! We also networked IRL and learned tons of information from the forums and amazing community at Bigger Pockets.
Though we live in Phoenix and it is the area we would most like to focus on, we just completed our first SFH in the Tucson market which led to negotiating our second project as we speak (both in the University of Arizona area). We remodeled this first house after buying it from my husband's parents with a lease to own contract and flipping it. Plans changed and we remodeled it and kept it in the family as a rental, with his parents reimbursing us and paying for the proceeds we likely would have pocketed, based on our estimated ARV. We completed the project by getting a private investor to loan us 50% of the funds needed.
In addition to everything we read, we learned a ton from the experience of completing this project and are hoping to continue to improve on our business and systems. Right now creating deal flow and finding quality projects seems to be our biggest challenge. We would love some feedback on what BP think of this deal or any of the above:
Planned to buy the 3bd,2ba property for 140K and remodel and create a fourth bedroom by sectioning off a piece of the large living room area and extending the hallway to the fourth bedroom.
Our costs, with brief descriptions, are below:
TLDR (If we stuck with the initial plan of selling at ARV):
Bought property for: $140,000
Renovation Cost: $64,890
Holding Costs: $5,196
Estimated Commission and Closing Costs: $13,368
Cost for Private Investor Money: $1750
ARV Estimate: $240,000
Profit: $14,796
Our initial goal was to make $24,000 or 10% of the sales price, but obviously we made some mistakes :).
These are some before pictures:
Design prior to remodeling
After Remodel Pictures:
After remodel floor plan
Your honest feedback would be wonderful and thanks for taking the time to read this. We really appreciate all the knowledge the Bigger Pockets community has to offer and look forward to interacting with so many inspiring people!
Ashley and Luis Vellon
