If you’re like me, you’re all over HGTV and all the real life home reno DIY shows like a rash, looking for ideas. They’re entertaining and inspirational but what the reality TV shows don’t show you is the reality of find, fixing and flipping for a living.

We do this for a living and maybe you’re still thinking about how you can do it for a living, so here’s 7 tips for finding, fixing and flipping homes for a living that will help you to get started.

Get your foundations in order

Have the correct tax structures set up make sure you start a GST registered company. Talk with a qualified accountant and make sure things are set up in the correct format.

This means that you also need to develop a good understanding of your numbers – GST, gross margin, gross profit, net profit and funding.

Hint: make sure your accountant of choice has experience with property trading, as a lot don’t!

Supply and demand

Before deciding where you’re going to do your flipping you have to know who your buyers will be. It goes without saying that the bottom of the market has the most buyers, so the way we minimise risk is to buy property that everyone in the market can afford to buy.

Check out things like employment opportunities, is the population growing or declining, transport, schools, places of worship. Go to the local council and find out what development is planned for the area. If there’s no demand you may find yourself doing a lot of hard work for very little return!

Find out some of our buying rules that we use to keep safe.

You need to buy well under market value to allow enough room for renovating, selling, taxes, gst and a small profit for yourself, and we always like to leave a little bit in it for the next person.

Build strong relationships

You’re going to need great relationships with 2 or 3 good agents from the top three real estate companies in your chosen area. This can take a lot of time – filtering out the wheat from the chaff. A good start is to regularly meet with those who have been in the business for more than 5 years.

You also going to need a trusted team. If you’re not part of MyProperties, it’s going to take you a long time to source suppliers and build a strong team of trades people that you can trust. We really look after our tradespeople, starting with paying them as soon as the job is done.

Fixing and flipping is all about adding value

It’s super easy to overspend, so again make sure you know who your buyers are, what the end value will be and stick to your budget! It’s easy to do more, but you may not get your money back, so for every $1 you spend you need to be able to bank $2 – if you can’t don’t spend it in the first place!

You’re already keeping up with decorating trends so make sure you don’t polarise your buying audience just because you like something. Keep your renovation contemporary, clean and on trend – use your staging for wow factor.

We typically add tiling to bathrooms and kitchens along with granite bench tops and stainless appliances and mix it up with flooring –polished floors are popular, bringing to life the beautiful native timer. If we’re using carpet we use a good quality underlay and a mid-range carpet, and mostly we’ll use made to measure window furnishings.

The finished product

There’s a few tips for selling that will ensure your home stands out from the crowd.

• Get your home staged. For a couple of thousand dollars and some creativity you can really show the home off and give your buyers a great feel for how to make the best of the spaces.
• Leave something in it for the next person. Apart from the feel good factor, it means if you sell privately you don’t need to get as much – that’s a win win! It doesn’t mean you can’t use your favourite agents to help you out – they still get paid if they introduce the buyer. And, depending on your appetite for selling, you may find it a whole lot more efficient using an agent.

Business or pleasure

Finding, fixing and flipping is a business. One that you can do full time, or part time so you can work around family, fun and life and for us is both business and pleasure.

What’s really important, is to have a clear strategy before you start, and one that you constantly revisit and review.

Be clear that your nest is a whole lot cosier when you pay lots of attention to it. If you’re good at finding, fixing and flipping you’re going to get good cash flow. This actually feeds the chicks. A good strategy for most people is one where you’re building up a portfolio in parallel to your flipping business because the income off your portfolio will one day provide you with all the cashflow you want.

Resilience

As with any business or investment, the market goes up and down so you may not always make as much as you first thought. Especially if you don’t have your numbers right at the start and pay too much, spend too much, take too long or set your selling price too high.

Finding, fixing and flipping is a short-term strategy that if done well can provide you with cashflow. How we mitigate risk is to make sure we don’t waste time on each project. In an ideal world the time between actually taking the property over, renovating and when you get the money for the sale post renovation back in your pocket would take 3 months. Once you go beyond this you need to make sure you have factored in extra holding costs.

It takes resilience and commitment to learn from mistakes and keep refining your business!