Kirsten Kemp and the new California real estate market

Well, the new season of Property Ladder is upon us (yay!). I'll have to say I like the fact that California is sort of kind of starting to mimic real estate markets in other places in that you're not guarenteed to make money just because you held the property for awhile! It's also good that they're branching out a bit to Texas and Florida, but I'd still like to see a good northern flip :)

Last week's episode was downright scary considering they risked $1.2 million (granted, it was somebody else's money) to make $37,000! That's a lot of risk and at a lot of work for a 3% return. The really scary thing about that Santa Barbara flip was that everything to do with the property itself went right. (No hidden mold or plumbing problems or . . .) I do think that forture favors the high end flip (don't want to price yourself out of the neighborhood), but doing your first flip on a $1.2 million property??

This week we saw a flip in Sacramento. I'll have to admit I'm amazed it sold, but an expert in California real estate I'm not. (I do a little better in MN real estate. Check out my blog Home Deals - Bargain Real Estate in Minnesota) To me neighborhood/location is everything, but I suppose not everybody views things the way I do. If I was really ambitious I'd try to figure out if it ever closed escrow, but given that it wasn't on a multiple listing service . . . If you missed it, they bought a beat up house in a not so great neighborhood and then didn't have it inspected. I'm all in favor of trying to flip a beat up house, it's the "not so great neighborhood" part that would make me very nervous. It also seems like a $400ish inspection is a pretty small investment to make when you're buying a house with a whole lot of unknowns. If it closed escrow they still made half decent money (forget that he quit his job to do the flip), but again pretty risky. Experienced fippers say you make your money when you buy . . .I guess that's something to remember . . .it lot of the whole flipping game is how much you pay for a property to begin with.