Property Ladder

I have a new show I love on TLC. It's called Property Ladder, and it follows first time house flippers as they buy a run down house, fix it up, and sell it for a significant profit. Now, if you want to see flipping done right, TLC also offers Flip That House. Flip That House shows a lot of more experienced flippers, sometimes people that do this for a living. These people usually don't do anything by themselves- they buy the house, hire a slew of contractors, quickly turn the house around and sell it for a killer profit (usually in the 100K range). The beauty of the pros is that since they're only supervising, so they are usually in the process of doing 3 or 4 houses at a time, like 10 a year. I think these people own their own personal Caribbean islands.

As I said earlier, Property Ladder on the other hand features novices. These people do everything wrong, and it's great to watch. The biggest thing with flipping (as I've learned from watching hours of these shows) is to do it quick- the mortgage payments really drag down your profit. Of course, the novices always blow their timelines by a matter of months. This morning, the woman wanted to turn around the house in 4 weeks, and it took her 16. That's 3 extra payments on a mortgage (in this case on a $600K house). Money down the drain!

The biggest reason this happens is because they try to do a lot of work themselves. This in itself is not a problem, but the average flipper featured on TLC is a rich, bored housewife who has never touched a hammer. I watched two women pull the old wooden siding off a house, and they had to stop multiple times to get splinters out of their eyes- and they never put on safety glasses! These same geniuses spent the better part of the afternoon trying to get the old fridge out of the kitchen. They couldn't get it through the door, and they kept saying "We just need another half inch!" They never just took the kitchen door off it's hinges, which would've bought them at least 3 inches! My favorite episode featured a 21-year old waitress named Ashley, who was a complete dumbass. She wanted to refurbish the cabinets in her condo, and first she had to strip off layers of old paint. After she and her friends spent the better part of a day working on one door they calculated that it would take 80 hours to strip them all. They perservered for the better part of a week (not doing any other work in the condo) without much progress. Discouraged, Ashley hires a guy who came into the bar to strip them all for $200. Long story short, the guy runs off with the doors and the cash, which sucks and isn't entirely Ashley's fault. Eventually she goes to buy new cabinet doors. Guess how much- $400 for the whole kitchen! How much time and money did she waste? The pros just buy new doors right off the bat.

The next mistake is that the novices make changes to make the house meet their taste, as opposed to what will add the most value. The host (a pro) calls this "Flipping 101." One woman would only paint the house colors from her own home, and would only get curtains identical to her own. The splinter geniuses painted every room pastel yellows, blues and greens, which the new owners immediately painted over- lot of value added there. Ashley put a ridiculous artsy glass bowl sink in the bathroom for like $450. The host suggested maybe adding a washer-dryer combo instead. Many of the potential buyers mentioned the lack of laundry facilities, and said things like "I'm not sure what's up with that sink." She also painted the bedroom blood-red, which we can be pretty sure the new owners loved. She kept saying that she was going for the effect of a "Tuscan Villa," and as the show went on it became clear that she didn't really know what a Tuscan Villa was.

So here's the upshot: This complete idiot who did everything wrong, who went months over schedule (meaning extra payments), spent months ruining the whole house before starting over and re-doing the work with professional contractors, and after all that still made a ridiculous looking condo, sold it for a killer profit. Her total haul? $68,000! An inept moron stumbles her way through a flip and clears more in 4 months than I make in a year! The loser this morning made her own slew of errors, actually took a 2 week vacation in the middle, didn't have any hardware in the bathrooms, and she made 168 large! They always make a lot of money, no matter how much they screw up. I'd like to see a show where they flipper loses a ton of money.

This leads me to one conclusion: I need to flip houses. I may not know much, but I know way more about home improvement than any of these people. And they make a fortune! Of course, you can't flip houses in St. Mary's county because there's no point- prices are high no matter what. Then there's the whole issue of the no extra money to buy a house or the time to do it. Maybe when I'm retired or something. At any rate, give the show a chance if you flip by it.