All Forum Posts by: Sheri Lowrance

I have an off-market 2 bdrm/1 bath, 1085sf, no basement, no garage, single family home a friend told me about where the seller will sell the home for $100K cash. It is in Old Town Arvada, which is a very popular location with rising prices and rents around $2K for 2 bedrooms. Zillow shows the estimated value around $370K, which I'm confident is the minimal ARV. Home was built in 1952 and appears to have never been updated. It does have a recently new roof and sewer main line to the street. Other than that, home has NOT been maintained and is in very poor condition. With my uneducated look, it doesn't appear to have foundation issues. It will need an entire gut with new electrical, windows, plumbing, etc. The garage was converted to an extra room, so could make it into a 3rd bedroom (and additional square feet, which probably isn't in the 1086sf showed online).

 I've never done a gut rehab before, nor even a fix and flip (only a couple of minor rehab and hold).  Can someone please help me confirm my #'s and see what I may be missing or significantly estimating wrong?

ARV: 370K

Purchase Price: 100K

Closing Costs: 5K

Finders Fee to friend: 10K

Financing Costs (my LOC): 2.5K for 6 mns

Rough Rehab Costs with a GC: 150K

Tax & Insur: 4K

Utilities:  1.2K for 6 mns

Sales Commission: 22.2K

TOTAL Expenses:  294.9

Before Tax Profit:  75.1K

Thank you!  This is scary for me!!!

@Matt M. Thank you, Matt!

I'm very interested in finding someone in my area (Denver metropolitan) that I could partner with and learn from during a local fix and flip project. I prefer to partner with someone that has at least 5 years experience fix and flipping lots of properties, but would consider less experience with a proven track record. I am NOT wanting to interfere with any decisions or progress in the activities. I just want to watch and learn from someone that is willing to answer my questions and share documentation and invoices with me.

What I have to offer:

• I have between $150K and $275K potentially available thru my lines of credit for funding, depending on the date and the deal.  I would want these funds returned with a sale of the property within 6 months.
• I’m a very good project manager for computer systems (NO construction project management) with over 20 years of experience and prior PMP certification.
• I’m great with numbers, spreadsheets, research, documentation and many other business related tasks.
• I have 3 rental properties of my own starting about 5 years ago, have been a (silent) private lender on a flip 4 years ago, and have participated in 2 multi-family syndication deals.

I welcome questions and suggestions from others regarding my search.  

Thank you!!!

Wow!  Excellent advice!  Thank you very very much, everyone!  I really appreciate it!  

I decided to pass on this deal. I am going to a big REI group meeting this week and will schedule more one on one coffee meetings with successful flippers to find a good fit using this advice. I don't have a large enough cash reserve or line of credit to fund a typical flip in my area, Denver, which is very expensive. By the middle of April I will have $115K line of credit at a 3.99% rate for the next 2 years, and I have about another $160K line of credit at a variable rate now. So, that only leaves $275K total I could finance. Given that this is below the typical cost of homes in my area, what kind of profit split would you recommend if I funded, say 50% fo the total cost of the project? Or what about if it was 75%? Any other recommendations that haven't been mentioned already?

Thank you again!

I'm wanting to learn about flipping in my local area. I met someone through Linked In that has a company that has been successfully doing fix and flips in Denver for about 1 year. He is offering me 10% interest for me to fund about $80K for the rehab portion of a property they just put under contract. My concern is I would only have a second mortgage position. They've got relatively low rates previously working with a hard money lender. Normally I would not consider a 2nd position, but am really wanting to work with someone willing to teach me threw this flipping deal. What suggestions or feedback do you have for me regarding this?

I found too many errors in the PiN system for me to feel comfortable trusting the data.  I wish I had an easy way to validate the Probate data since they seems to potentially save the most time for those leads.  I requested a refund within the required 3 day period, but have yet to hear when I will get my refund.  The original sales person I talked to has only sent me emails requesting time to correct the errors I found.  I declined.

The following are highlights of some of the data errors I found:

- REO (Bank Owned) data seemed wrong to me based on my searches in a county system where I am familiar with their foreclosure documents.

- I couldn't confirm any of the phone #'s provided.  The only one that responded to my text said they had not heard of the property owner and that they had the same phone # for 15 years.   

- Some of the data in the exported data is clearly wrong, such as numeric values for some of the counties instead of names of the counties.  

- A field titled "Vacant" with Yes or No values sometimes conflicted with another data field titled "Occupied".  For example, how can it be Vacant Yes, but Occupied Yes?  There were many of these that conflicted.

I signed up for PiN Jan. 31st and have until tomorrow to cancel and get my refund.  I am running data exports and testing the data today.  So far, I definitely see some bad data, but that is expected with any data mining tool such as this.  As I get more measurable results about the accuracy of the data, I'll post on here.  If I can't get a comfort level on if the data is accurate, I will cancel tomorrow.  I'm running searches for the Denver, CO metro area and Orland, FL area.  If you are aware of any properties that meet any of the following criteria in either of those areas, let me know ASAP and I'll cross-reference to see if the data is accurate.  The properties that pull up in the export include the following:  Vacant, Probate, Bank Owned, Not in Foreclosure (but Vacant or maybe Probate?), or "Certificate Of Purchase/certificate Of Foreclosure Recorded".