telophase | (no subject)

While I was eating dinner, I started watching one of the ubiquitous house-flipping shows; this one called Property Ladder. And it's become hugely entertaining, mostly because it's an awesome exercise in epic FAIL. Two friends go in on a condo with starry-eyed idealism and a plan to renovate it in two weeks on a budget of $12,000. Um. Well, first they expect to save a ton of money because they're hiring a friend to help and doing all the work themselves. Or maybe not. One of the guys is claiming that they agreed he wasn't to do any manual labor.

And it totally goes downhill from there: they never hired a dumpster, and so the condo association is threatening them with fines for using their dumpsters, the two people doing the actual work sneak behind the other guy's back and do demolition that he doesn't want, and then he shuts down the project (apparently he's got control of the money somehow) for ten days while they argue argue argue, and when it gets started again they still can't agree on anything, and it's just all FAIL FAIL FAIL.

I love this, because no matter how badly I screw something up, I can look back on this and say that at least I'm not one of these guys.

(P.S. Their mortgage payment is $4000/month. HAH! And did I mention the no-manual-labor guy keeps wanting to do feng shui stuff instead of actual renovation?)

ETA: HA HA HA. Total cost? $25,000. Time? 16 weeks. The kitchen? Looks pretty damn crappy. XD Closet doors? Missing. Etc.

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Heh. I don't know if it's the exact same show, but my dad loves watching Property Ladder. The times I've watched it I sat there with a kind of stunned look on my face that anyone can be that stupid and/ or incompetent. It's almost as if they scour the land looking for the most disorganised people they can find.

I don't know what goes through these people's minds: "Hey! We don't know a damn thing about how to do any of this! Let's get into a HUGE FINANCIAL HOLE with each other! Yeah!!"

I mean, flipping a house does seem like a nifty experience, but I'm not stupid enough to do it with (a) someone else who's never done it before and (b) a realistic budget and timeframe laid out by someone who knows what they're talking about or, I have to admit, (c) at all. XD

Hee, that's awesome. :)

By the end of the show: no sale for two months, even though they'd lowered the asking price by $8000. If they didn't sell it within 30 days of the end of filming, they didn't make a profit, and if they didn't sell it in 60 days, they lost money.

Why do I think they lost a lot of money? Just a hunch.

It's comforting to know that there's someone out there who is guaranteed to make us look extra spiffy when we finally get our butts in gear to do something about our elderly house. Of course, we plan to do as little of it ourselves as possible ... .

(After the experience of having the kitchen on our previous house re-done to make it sell better, I have very few illusions.)

The couple on the next show were utter professionals in comparison. They'd bought a six-rental-unit building for $600K to renovate and started with a budget of $90K, which had unavoidable ballooned to something like $237K by the time they finished due to unexpected surprises with plumbing and electricity. But they took it philosophically, saying that stuff like that had to be expected when renovating older properties, and stood to make $200+K in profit if it sold at the $1.1 million that the realtors suggested.

I've been curious about the whole flipping phenomenon for awhile (hey, that doesn't quite sound right). With my dad getting ready to move into an assisted living duplex, we'll need to sell his house, but nothing good has been done to the inside since it was built in 1977. I suspect it will take a flipper to make it saleable.

And I bet that all depends on the market in your area. I think all the shows I've been watching were filmed before the housing bust, so I have no idea how many of them would be as saleable today.

My mom's house requires a serious amount of work to make it saleable, but I think she's convinced the neighbors, who want part of the land it's on, that they need to buy the whole house and land parcel, sell the part of the land they don't want, and use that money to renovate the house, then sell it. The husband is a dab hand with house-building, having built a major part of their current house himself, and they're also in need of something for either he or his wife to work on at home, since the wife's 90-year-old mother lives with them and needs an attendant nearby. This whole project would be a boon for them in that way.

Dunno if/when it'll happen, though. XD

I like to watch "Flip That House" simply because Cam Clarke does the narration >.>

I find a lot of the shows about house flipping portray the same kinds of people D:

Some of the people on Property Ladder actually do their research before they make the buy. I could tell within less than 5 minutes that the ones on tonight's show weren't among that group.

The only way that you make a huge profit by flipping a house is by doing your research, knowing your limits, and doing a hell of a lot of work.

... which is why I picked a house to buy that had been flipped by someone who does it for a living, so I don't have to worry about it. ^__^