Selling Rehab 4470 - Yahoo

We should be selling rehab 4470 tomorrow.   We have learned some very valuable lessons on this one and pretty much will break even on our investment.  However we lose the sweat equity which in some cases is very hard to quantitate outside of a lot of nights and weekends.  If I had to list the biggest factors into why it took 8 months to fix up and sell -our longest ever it attribute it to the following factors in retrospect.

Stick to your market

Traditionally we have worked in the <$200K market.  This way our first foray into the $200K + market and we found that there were just less buyers that were willing to pay that amount in the current market conditions.  So back to the basics!  There are also more buyers at lower prices.

Don't underestimate Negatives

This house had a few negatives that in the end were greater than we originally thought.  The first negative was it was a large house with only two bedrooms rather than 3 bedrooms.  Another was the back yard backed up to a fence and behind the fence was a ditch.  Several buyers said they liked the house but the back yard was just two small.  As a point of reference the house we flipped before this one had a wall and a busy street behind it - however there was room for a pool between the house and the wall.

Don't over improve

This can sometimes be the hardest thing to do.  This house had about 300 sq ft of tile in the kitchen and hallway that we jack hammered out and replaced with 18 x 18 tile.  Did we really need to do this?  It probably added $1000 in cost and a month of time between removing the old tile, jack hammering up the old thinset, and putting the new tile in.  It seemed like a good idea at the time.  We also took down a small wall between the kitchen and dining room and rerouted the electric - it ended up looking realy good but it can't say it helped sell the house for any more than we did.  Look at improvements really close - its easy to go over board.  At the end of the day the more you do the longer it takes - the longer it takes the more it costs and the market can change even more and usually not in your favor these days.

In retrospect we learned alot in doing this house and alot of it was what not to do.  the house turned out great and we are very proud of what we did.  I'd rather have money in the bank and have done less and gotr rid of it sooner. 

Guess we paid for that lesson with sweat equity - happy rehabbing.