All Forum Posts by: Mike LaCava

Welcome Shane. BP is a great place to learn & looking forward to see you succeed.

Welcome Risto - It starts with a plan & writing down your goals so good for you and your partner. As you can see BP is a great place to learn from. Find the investor's that are buying and take them our for lunch and ask very specifically what they are looking for and what #'s or formula they use to calculate the maximum they will pay for a property. This will allow you lock it up at the right price & allow you to add in what you want for a wholesale fee. Love to hear your success so keep us all posted!

Thanks for sharing Bobby! Talk to you later

I agree with most of the comments on this. I can not believe the perception of the media of Real Estate investors/flippers. I know I am doing a good thing in this economy. I have purchased several homes in my home town & rehabbed them & most all of them were purchased by first time home buyers. These were houses on the market for many months in some cases so one should ask the question why were they not purchased by the home buyer then. Well to BP members and other's the answer is obvious but looks like the media wants to put a negative spin on it and say we are shutting out opportunity for these buyers.
This is completely absurd. We are putting local contractors, lumber yards, attorney's, realtors, accountants, local bankers........to work and creating jobs. People come up to me and thank me for rehabbing that abandoned home and restoring their neighborhood.
Yet I must tell you I had a similar problem on a house I purchased at auction with the people still in it. I HELPED them re-locate and paid them some money to assist them. Somehow I was labeled the bad guy by a few people in town who were politically connected. The big bad investor. Do I need to go on. They certainly never mentioned the nice young couple who purchased the home on a USDA affordable loan program. I took it personally for a while but realized some people just have a one sided opinion and agenda and you are not going to be liked by everyone no matter how good of a reputation you have.
Unfortunately their are unethical and dishonest people in this business just like any other business and it is sad for any one to be labeled based on the actions of few. It is too bad the media does not take the time to really see the truth. Bad news always trumps good news.
Thanks to people like Joshua Dorkin and the BP community, maybe we will get some good press.

Yes it is true the higher the sale price the higher the profit or at least it should be because it is all relative. I recently sold a house for a little over $300K and the profit was $80,000. Sold another at $230K and the profit was around $60,000. These were home runs and wish I could tell you they have been all like that but that is not true. I have 2 I just sold in the $175,000 range and made just a little over $20,000K which is more like a single for me. Projected around $35,000 but ran into a higher rehab & a little lower selling price & longer holding period. This is why I use the 70% formula to protect any downside to the projections. I guess every market can be a little different & you just have to due your due diligence ahead of time.

Local REIAs are certainly a pitch fest, no doubt.

However, if you can bear the pitch and get to meet people, including potential partners, like-minded individuals and also private money lenders as well as some hard money lenders, the local REIAs are pretty good places to start out.

Are the ideal? Absolutely not. But they do offer the new real estate investor a great way to get out and start talking with like-minded individuals who are actually getting things done.

What amazes me with those articles that started this whole thread is that they don't touch on how much good house flippers actually do to run down neighborhoods. We just completed a house flip in a run-down, but improving section of Onset Massachusetts that was a complete eyesore for the neighborhood for nearly 5 years.

Some of the neighbors came up to me and thanked me as we redid the house, increased their real estate values and improved the neighborhood as a whole. It didn't hurt that we were able to sell it within two days.

Not only do we make some profit sure, but we also vastly improve the neighborhood but we also helped to provide a solid place for a new family to live, where they can raise their families and live their lives with dignity.

Those profits are just way too high. It's articles like these that bring on new potential house flippers and then they just get discouraged because they don't realize a $72,000 profit.

Not sure where they're dreaming up all those numbers, but soft costs, finance costs and holding costs all factor into the equation. Don't forget about real estate commissions as well when you sell.

Unfortunately it's articles like these in major newspapers that give new house flippers and inflated sense of how much money can be made in this business. Sure, we'd all like to make those kinds of dollars when we flip houses, but if you don't know what you're doing you get into trouble really quickly. And also, by telling only half the story. As far as "profits" are concerned, it sucks in new be real estate investors who feel that this business is "easy".

Nonetheless, great fodder for discussion on this forum!

Hey Tony, I figured I'd weigh in on this one. Fortune builders really do know what they're doing question of doubt. The problem is in their programs that they dish you off to a less than expert person and oftentimes your "coach" is a different person each time you use them. When I first started, I used these kinds of programs and although I did learn a lot, I ended up feeling disappointed in the end.

The other guys responding here are absolutely correct, you're in one of the best places on the Internet to learn about real estate investing. Specifically house flipping. So I'd encourage you to read as much as you can hear but also bear in mind you can certainly will shorten your learning curve by having a personalized coach or even a mentor. I wish I had that when I first started! It certainly would cut down a lot of the mistakes that I learned on my own and grow to save me thousands even though it cost me thousands to go through some of those programs.

Are you I would just search for "how to flip houses" on bigger pockets or even in Google and see what you find out there's lots of great resources out there for sure.