the Wealthy Canadian

We’ve talked about buying a family home, but what if you’re intending to ‘flip’ your property? Many of the same aspects that apply to family home ownership still apply, but some of the indicators can be viewed with shorter time spans in mind. However, don’t completely discount long-term profitability: it adds an important attraction to your property when your home on the market. So what should you do when searching for that next real estate investment?

Experts continually suggest that when looking for a property to flip, you should be watchful for either an under-valued property or a property that can be improved in order to increase its valuation.

In the case of under-valued properties, you would look for foreclosures or must-sell situations. However do not be fooled by those late night real estate ‘gurus’ because investment in this situation isn’t as easy as they make it look. The majority of their no-money-down ‘success’ stories are at the very least exaggerated. What are the things to watch for? In the instance of foreclosure, you may want to find the reasoning behind the default to the bank. Maybe your intended property is fatally flawed in its construction and would require far more money to make it habitable than you paid for it in the first place. Must-sell situations also need to be examined to ensure that it is timing that is driving the seller to bargain and not some future cut in services or existing environmental disaster.

Once you acquire your property, there are many things that you can do to it to improve its valuation. We will examine some of those in our next article.