Buying a "flipped house" - would you, have you?

[Downinthetubestationatmidnight]

I've seen a "flipped" house on Rightmove today, i.e. one bought and done up quickly to sell for a big profit. My friend lives in the area and knows of the vendors, she tells me this is the third/fourth time they have flipped and make around £100,000 each time when they sell a year after doing up. The vendors have FT jobs, this is something done alongside those. Nothing wrong with flipping of course. But, have doubts on how well the work would be done etc. Property has no extension done, work all cosmetic.

I think it depends. We bought our first house which had been "flipped" by a developer. (And yeah, for £100k more than they paid for it!)
But the work done was a huge amount- Victorian, stripped back to the brick, rewired, replastered, new windows, new roof, central heating installed, loft insulated, jungle cleared, etc. All decorated neutrally. We got a wonderful cosy home, that was cheap and easy to heat, and kept the heat in. Needed absolutely no work the ten years we had it, still looked good when we sold it on.
If it's a property development company that have done it, there's no reason it would be shoddy- they have a reputation to uphold.
I see other properties this company have done (because they use a specific wallpaper!!) and they go like hotcakes.

P.S. re buying a flipped house-I’d be very slow to do so. They’re out to make a profit and the more you spend on quality finishes and bathrooms and kitchens, the less profit you make, so for that reason I’d be very wary. When people are selling houses they’ve lived in themselves, they usually have made more of an effort to have good kitchens and bathrooms and work done on the house is probably of a higher standard as they haven’t been under pressure to do it in the shortest amount of time for the smallest outlay of cash possible so as to make as large a profit as possible.

We have been refurbishing and selling houses as a business for 30 years. We recently missed out on a house at auction. The costs of buying, selling and the work would have cost 64 thousand pounds and we hoped to make thirty thousand for the risk, and the work involved. We are a small company. Can't comment on the house you are looking at. Incidentally, flipping usually means buying a property and selling it straight on for a profit having done nothing, often before the flipper has completed on the purchase. Mortgage companies don't like those flipped properties.

And my husband has always taken a great pride in how well our properties are finished. Our prices are more realistic than some private sellers as we don't want properties taking a long time to sell.

I have flipped houses. Work is always to a very high standard. We buy in areas with expensive older homes, families want new build modern quality in an established neighbourhood.

Get a good survey done, it will let you know what work has been Carried out and to what standard. I have viewed some flipped houses that are awful, but it’s easy to spot a half assed patch up.

I can see how it is possible to make that kind of profit. If you have the skills to do the work yourself (or most of it) and you buy a crap house in a desirable area.

If it's been done up purely to sell then it's in the interest of the seller to do it as cheaply as possible to keep the profit margin as high as possible.
If it was cosmetically poor, then it's likely the other things were too, such as boiler, heating system etc. It's the expensive things you need to look out for that can't be covered by a layer of paint.
But if the price is right and you like the house then just proceed with caution.

tbh a year or 18 months is quite a slow turn around. the ones you see on TV usually do it in weeks/a few months.

Where I live, the neighbourhood was built 20 years ago, and as houses come up for sale, developers are snapping them up as they're just the right age to be flipped. The house next door to me looked no different from the outside but there were new bathrooms, kitchen, ducting, heating etc. They had an open house and it was totally amazing - even the boiler room was a delight to be in.

I didn't want the house, but I did go back home wishing I could afford to do so much work and get my house so perfect. The quality and finish were excellent. I've never been jealous of a boiler room before.

Are you suggesting they did the cosmetic upgrades themselves, holding down full-time jobs? And they took a year to do it? And have put it back on the market for £100,000 more than they paid for it?

Wouldn’t even waste my time looking at it. Even if it’s reasonably priced for the area, and I’m dead set on the area and nowhere else, as long as I have no burning need to move right now, I’d wait. Something better value for money will come up.

It depends on the house and whether the bulk of the work is done by the owners. If they are 'handy' or have access to trades within their social circle, then this is a common occurrence in my area.

They get together, they buy what is affectionately known as a probate house that hasn’t been touched in the thick end of 30 or 40 years, and rip it all out, re plaster, re wire, re plumb, check the roof, add in a low end kitchen and bathroom, minimum tile, and cheaply carpet. This is systematically done over evenings and weekends, usually starting around Easter time (you can spot all the skips being delivered - you just look up your own roads) and takes around 4 to 6 months.

Voila, for very little outlay there is a lot of profit to be made as the labour is nearly always free, the tools are already owned, and the material bought at trade price and off set against personal (self employed) tax liabilities.

If the house is to keep - then they all work on each other houses, in a you-scratch-my-back sort of way, just paying material costs, never labour costs. The sparkie does the plumbers wiring, the plumber does the plasterers boiler, the plaster does the joiners brickwork and so forth, all swapping trades for mutual benefit.

And this is why I never comprehend this forum in its utter pettiness about charging family and friend’s petrol money, or charging for babysitting, or Christmas dinner

We have bought a house at auction, done it up and sold it for a fair profit. Did put in a new kitchen, bathroom and windows. Painted all walls off white laid wooden floors in main living areas.
We have friends who are plumbers and electricians so had 'mate's rates' for many jobs.Other work we did ourselves. Was hard work but well worth it.
We are now looking for another property at auction. You have to do your homework re.surveyors report etc. but you can get a good buy and the potential to make an excellent profit if you're prepared for hard work.

We have done it a couple of times, taking places which were all but uninhabitable and turning them into warm, safe homes. DH was an electrician plus also good at other trades. Got a gas plumber in to install or totally renew central heating.

These werent the types of homes where a premium kitchen or bathroom would be expected but with canny purchasing we were able to achieve a good standard of fittings.

It is easy to be sneery but the majority of people are quite happy with a well fitted Wickes/B&Q/whoever kitchen and bathroom.

Definitely not! Most doing this are unscrupulous to some degree and it's mostly cosmetic and covering up the crappy bits. If it was a thorough job I'd want to see what's been done structurally, electrics, insulation, plumbing etc etc, the the things that actually matter.

Buyer be ware - and get a a decent surveyor.

But people do do this for a living and they arent charlatans, well, not all of them

I thought you meant an upside down house at first (bedrooms down other rooms up)

Me too Maddie, don't worry!

I've not done this but I did buy a flipped property. It had a new central heating system, kitchen and bathroom and had been magnolia'd and re-carpeted. It had been done cheaply, but it was perfect for what I needed at the time (just coming out of a bad relationship and wanting a clean, fresh start).

I'd only buy one now if it had been done well. If it's purely cosmetic changes, either they bought a bargain in the first instance or are pushing their luck with the asking price now.

I think it's more of a case of "if I didn't know up front if it had been flipped, would I still buy it at this price"?

I think you are asking the wrong questions.

Do you want a project, or do you want a house to live in immediately?
What houses are available in your area?
How are they priced?

I personally would be reluctant to pay a premium because someone just put a lick of paint and a new carpet that I will rip off the minute I move in. If the price is competitive, why not, unless you really want a project.
There's no guarantee at all that the "family home" you are buying wont' be full of questionable diy because they have spent the last 15 years in it.
New builts can be full or horrors.

Either you buy a shell and you redo everything yourself, or you risk a lot of cheap and nasty fixes to make the house look good, whatever you purchase.

House on our road was snapped up by a developer, put crappy everything in and then sold of for 25%more than purchased for.
Sold it to another developer who ripped out the budget floors, kitchen and bathroom and sold it again for another 25% increase.

I would start by looking on rightmoce at 'Sold Prices" you can then see exactly what it sold for before and also see the old house details. So that may give you some idea of how it was before. Obviously you can't see close up. But just an idea.
Link to Sold Prices :

www.rightmove.co.uk/house-prices.html

Would totally depend on the quality of the improvements and how well it was priced compared to other houses. I can imagine buying a bomb site of a house and doing a quality bathroom, kitchen, replastering, etc maybe some internal reconfiguration could add value to a house. If the couple have good DIY skills it's possible that the quality of the work is good.

I flip houses, all work to perfection. Look at the work. Any house could have been done cheaply or badly or not.

I also thought it was a house with bedroom downstairs and kitchen upstairs.

Have they made £100k profit or are they selling it for £100k more?

It wouldn't bother me.

Obviously it's annoying to pay significantly more for basic upgrades that you could have made yourself but if it's a home you like that's still fairly priced, refusing to buy it because it's been flipped seems like cutting off your nose to spite your face.

It my view a lot of the price increases in flipped houses are more attributable to rising house prices and the area improving than the actual improvements made to the house. Especially if the "flip" takes years rather than months.

As for quality, I'd rather have a cheap kitchen that was newly put in than a kitchen that was cheap and has had 15 years of wear.

The people who 'flip' houses local to me seem to have an absolute bonkers taste in decor for the area.

The premium paid locally is for original features in Victorian terraces.

The flippers all seem to have the same, modern-officey type tastes coupled with a few token bits of coving. And a Neff kitchen. Always a Neff kitchen.

These properties always come on at the top of the market for their 'high spec' interiors, and always sell for less than the quirky, creaky, original places done up in muted F+B tones.

I enjoy this as a spectator sport.

Looking at the history of our house, at one point it was sold for £20,000, six months later resold for £79,000. I'd say the workmanship was acceptable, but the people before us made some, shall we say unwise decisions, that messed things up a bit...

Lesson learned, do not buy from anyone whose hobby is DIY.

I'd also add that if you're in an area with japanese knotweed I'd be very wary of a flipped house with a completely cleared garden. Saw a lot of that and it didn't look so good 6 months later.

18 months between buying and selling doesn't suggest a speed botch job - if they were in and out in 4 weeks it would be a different matter. Go have a close look, ask to see electric certificates etc. Find out what work has been done (just a repaint or have they extended?). Lots of people buy do up and sell to make a living (or additional money in this case) some do a great job other bit so much. Over 10 years after moving into our "newly developed" house we are still finding bodged jobs. Within weeks of moving in we referred to it as like a brothel in the wild west - because everything in it had been fucked by a cowboy! Still love the house though even if I could cheerfully throttle the former owners and their so called "professional" builder.