House Flippers-Skip the WOW and Go for the Details

Over the past few days I've been on the house hunt with a great young couple relocating to Fort Belvoir this summer. Based on their price range we have been concentrating on properties in the Woodbridge area of Prince William County. The more listings we pulled, the more "flips" we found and a tour of ten of those over two days found some surprising differences.

Obviously the goal of a flip is to get a home ready, on the market and sold as quickly as possible. A few of the properties we toured are owned by the same investment group and you could instantly tell their style. The same paint color, the same appliances, the same carpet, I think you get the picture. We called them the Stepford Houses after the movie Stepford Wives. They looked good but when you started examining the details you found a number of flaws.

Some of them were little details. Missing molding around the engineered flooring, cheap fixtures and bad caulking in the bathrooms start to become more noticeable as you tour more homes. Very few of the properties had spent time on the outside of the property. Overgrown bushes, messy yards, dirty decks and leaning fences were common.

Then there were the homes that tried to WOW you with a kitchen that is straight out of HGTV (okay the Ikea showroom). Except as you look around the house you find they left the 1980's wooden stair railings, the 1990's wall mirrors in the hallways and ceiling fans that are covered with at least 5 years of dust. Painting seems to be the biggest issue that flippers seem to have. Certainly it is cheaper and easier to get out the spray gun and go to town. But painting over every electric outlet and light switch, is just sloppy work and devalues anything else you might have done.

The house we found and have a ratified contract on wasn't the fanciest of the bunch but the contractor had done a reasonable job on the both the inside and the outside of the home. It doesn't have granite and stainless steel appliances but it does have a power washed deck and a new fence! It does have new light fixtures that match and the paint job wasn't slapped on with the cheapest paint they could find. Will we find a few issues during the home inspection? I can see tell that they forget the GFCI switches in the kitchen and bathrooms during the remodel but overall this flipper spent money wisely. They didn't try to WOW you with a kitchen that doesn't fit with the style of the home or take the cheap way out with a spray gun. They took care of both the inside and the outside of the home and made it fit with the rest of the neighborhood.

So house flippers step back and take a look at your properties before you put them on the market. Just like every seller you need to take a look at your investment through a buyer's eye. The details matter and can be more important than the WOW factor when it comes to getting your home sold.