The Flipping Blueprint: The Complete Plan for Flipping Houses and Creating Your Real Estate-Investing Business

By Luke Weber

The Flipping Blueprint 2nd Edition is just what the title says, a blueprint on how to flip houses with more updates and tips for todays markets. Everything you need to begin or continue your journey in real estate investing is here. How to present yourself to other real estate professionals, where to find the deals, how to talk to private lenders, where to find contractors, how to maximize profits on your flips and more. This is your guide to creating your real estate investing future. If you have ever thought about getting into real estate investing, this book will show you how to do it safely and securely.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781098398279

Book preview

cover.jpg

© Luke Weber 2021

Print ISBN: 978-1-09839-826-2

eBook ISBN: 978-1-09839-827-9

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Other Books by Luke Weber

The Flipping Blueprint.

The Complete Plan for Flipping Houses and Creating Your Real Estate-Investing Business

The Wholesaling Blueprint.

Real Estate Investing with No Money Out of Your Pocket

The Rental Property Blueprint.

How to Build, Maintain and Enjoy Your Real Estate Rental Portfolio

The Real Estate Private Investors Blueprint.

Reduce Risk While Finding More Profitable Ventures

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to my wife Yvette and my son Ashur, you are my why.

Tony P for helping make this happen.

To my parents for teaching me values, respect and how to share.

Finally, to all of my business associates, friends and my ever expanding network. We all succeed together.

Contents

Preface

Introduction –

Who Am I and Why a Blueprint?

CHAPTER 1 –

Who are you? Creating your Real Estate Story

CHAPTER 2 –

How to Analyze Markets Like the Experts

CHAPTER 3 –

The No Formula Formula: How to Run Your Numbers and Accurately Determine After-Repair Value (ARV)

CHAPTER 4 –

The Overflowing Inbox

Chapter 5 –

The Conversation, Making the Offer

CHAPTER 6 –

How to Fund the Deal

CHAPTER 7 –

Finding, Managing, and Paying Contractors

CHAPTER 8 –

The Gift—Selling Your Flip and Collecting Your Profit

CHAPTER 9 –

Contracts and Closing — Maximize Your Profit Potential

CHAPTER 10 –

Remote Investing—The Five Must-Haves for the Remote Investor

CHAPTER 11 –

Beware the Black Hole—The Power of Social Networking

CHAPTER 12 –

Scaling Your Business. To Scale or Not to Scale, That is the Question.

Conclusion–

Keeping the Business Moving

Preface

It’s been over 5 years since I first wrote The Flipping Blueprint and it has changed so many lives and made readers millions of dollars in real estate profits. From the brand new investor to the experienced professional just looking for a new tip or two, The Flipping Blueprint has been a success. So why make a 2nd Edition? Why change something that is working? Because markets change, buyer desires shift, pricing changes, strategies adjust and you, the investor, need to be always evolving as well. Because I want to make sure that you have the best available information on how to flip houses and create your real estate investing business!

If you are a first time reader take note, real estate profits don’t happen over night and they don’t happen without work. The profits come to those that take action and continuous action. So read. Take notes. Read again. The words within here have value. Your time has value. When you put these together you can create something amazing!

Welcome to The Flipping Blueprint!

Introduction –

Who Am I and Why a Blueprint?

The year was 2001 when I quit my job. I was managing a travel company for a boss who was the definition of horrible. He had just gone off on a particularly nasty, expletive-filled, and sexist tirade in front of multiple employees, stormed out of my office, and slammed his office door like a child. I had had enough. I packed up my belongings, walked into his office and dropped my keys on his desk, and told him I’m out. He looked up at me and said, Do you know what this does to me? I should shoot you right now. He kept a loaded gun in his desk. I calmly turned around and walked out of his office, gathered up my belongings, and left. I was done, I was free. For the next few months I traveled and enjoyed the stress-free life of being unemployed. However, my finances, or lack thereof, soon caught up with me. With my savings dwindling, my checking account decided it was time for me to get a new job. After the high stress levels and long hours of my last job, I wanted something simple, something stress-free, something easy. I looked through the want ads and answered a data-entry position at an appraisal company, and that is where my real estate journey began.

I quickly went from the data-entry position to getting my appraiser’s license. After a year of learning how to evaluate residential properties, I took the plunge when I was 22 years old and bought my first property. A $134,000 two-bedroom/two-bathroom condominium located in Las Vegas. The condo had been a rental property for an out-of-state investor and looked the part. I doubted the tenant had ever cleaned. Dust was piled on top of every surface it could cling to, darkened footpaths were carved into the carpet, and the smell would have been enough to turn away anyone that didn’t have a strong stomach. It was perfect. I negotiated the price down from $145,000 with a few thousand dollars in seller-paid closing costs thrown in and bought the property with a Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan. I found contractors to replace the carpet and paint the property. I found other contractors to lay tile and install granite countertops. I bought materials and installed fixtures and completed small repairs myself. You quickly learn the extent and limits of your construction skills when an electrical current is coursing through your body. I moved into the property before the work was done and continued to work on it evenings and weekends. I overpaid contractors, the project took twice as long as it should have, and I overimproved the property. I did almost everything wrong, but when it was time to sell I sold the property for $279,500 and made more than $80,000! I was hooked. I bought another property, then two more; I moved from one house to another. I started buying rentals and making passive money. 2004 and 2005 rolled through and it was hard to not make money on real estate. Everyone could qualify for a loan, and you could buy a house and sell it the next day for a profit. But it couldn’t, it wouldn’t, last. The final property I bought before it all came tumbling down was on June 30, 2005, a dream home for my wife and I. I had my own appraisal company I was running out of my home office, and the real estate investing was just a side gig at that time. A way for us to take nice vacations and buy a bigger and better home. But I saw the market shifting, red flags began popping up. I saw new-home builders start offering more incentives to buyers. I saw inventory levels of houses increasing. I became nervous and cancelled the contracts that I had on several new-construction properties. Although the real estate industry was passionately telling people to keep buying houses, it was looking like this fun roller-coaster ride we had all been on was about to take a plunge. I tried to warn my friends, but the hype kept pushing people to buy well past the point of no return. I began selling my properties in 2006, but we had already reached the pinnacle and were headed down faster than I could have imagined. The pace quickened, and we began screaming our way to the bottom through 2007 to 2009 as the Las Vegas market dropped 65% from its peak values. Markets across the entire United States were in a free fall. Business came to a halt, and my family, like many others across the country, felt the collapse of an over inflated and unsecured economy. If you didn’t know it already, I hope you do now, real estate markets are full of up and downs.

After years of struggling and fighting our way through issue after issue, reduced work, financial stress, dwindling accounts, I finally saw a change in the market. It was 2010 and it was time to buy. But not like before. The speculative purchases people were making from 2003 to 2007 were gone. I began to do more research and became a more knowledgeable buyer. My wife and I cashed out the $80,000 that we had left in the stock market and went all in. We began to flip. But not like before; we were not going to get hurt like that again. We began to buy rentals again. But not like before. Things started to look up for us. We started making profits again. I bought a new home for my family, a short sale that was a steal, because the banks didn’t know how to handle their inventory. Then one night in January 2012 everything changed. It was that time in the evening when you check your phone before going to bed, there shouldn’t be any calls, everything is fine, and you can go to sleep. I had three missed calls and three voice mails. I listened to the voice mails and heard a distressed voice come through the phone speaker, muffled by the sound of sirens. My father had had a heart attack. My father, my friend, my son’s Opa. I raced to the hospital, 80 miles an hour down 35-mile-an-hour roads. I still vividly remember that nighttime drive, me repeating to myself No, no, no all the way to the hospital. When I arrived I had to run from one side of the hospital to the other, three different desks I had to stop at to find him. Frantic, I remember the looks on the nurses’ faces; they already knew. No matter how fast I went, it was already too late. He was gone, just like that. I was hit, I was knocked down. It sometimes takes a shock for you to figure out your life and whether you are on the path you want to be on. It took me 6 months to fight through my depression, my pain, to realize I wasn’t doing what I wanted and I wasn’t providing for my family the way I wanted. I was working too hard and not getting anywhere. Time is precious, time with your family is precious. I was working 10- to 14-hour days, 6 and 7 days a week. I had to change what I was doing. Again I doubled down on real estate, as I knew this was the path to recovering my time and reaching financial freedom. At this point I was flipping a house about every 2 months, but still as a side gig, I knew there had to be a better approach. There had to be ways to be more efficient, more profitable. I closed the doors of my appraisal business and I began going to real estate–investing seminars, paying tens of thousands of dollars sometimes. I would pick up a little bit of knowledge here and there. If I only learned one thing, gathered one missing piece of information at each of these events that would save me or make me $1,000 on a deal, and I could repeat that experience 100 times, the seminars would more than pay for themselves.

Sitting in one of these rooms, I finally took stock of who was there with me. It was a $40,000 event and there were about 500 people in the room. Most of them didn’t know a thing about real estate, and I had to wonder how many of these people could have even afforded to be there. Over the course of that weekend I found out that many of these people had maxed out credit cards, had borrowed money from family, or had taken out a second mortgage to attend. I was frustrated. I was sad. Most of these people had drunk the Kool-Aid and were starstruck by these pseudo-celebrities and were being taught next to nothing! I was there to hopefully find one or two nuggets of gold; these people were there because they thought they were going to get the keys to the kingdom! The guru at this particular event answered one of my questions while he was on stage by telling me to just use Google to find my answer! In this room of 500 people who each paid $40,000, he was telling me, and all of them, the answers were on Google. So why did I, why did we all pay him $40,000? Well, guess what, it was on Google, not all the information I was looking for, but parts of it. There were still missing pieces to the answer of my question, to everyone’s questions. Pieces these gurus didn’t know or couldn’t provide. I had other attendees coming up to me at these seminars addressing questions to me instead of to the staff who were the supposed experts. Little did we know that these staff members who were paraded around as the experts had for the most part never even flipped a house! They were just salespeople trying to gain your trust for the next upsell. Maybe you have also paid $20,000, $50,000, even $80,000 to attend a real estate–investing course and learn what a guru said was the best way to flip a house using his or her secret formula that could make you rich just like him or her. You went to the classes, the boot camps, the bus tours, the action-packed weekends with lots of jumping and dancing and getting out of your comfort zone, but you still can’t get a Realtor to work with you or find you flippable properties. Your education materials are sitting on a shelf or in a closet just collecting dust. Why isn’t this working? You are not alone. There are tens of thousands of people who have gone to these seminars and have not been able to achieve anything with the limited education they received. Did you ever stop to think and ask the guru when he or she actually worked on projects? Probably not. Most gurus are no longer making money in real estate (a lot never even did!). You paid big money to be taught outdated, watered-down, and generic principles that don’t work. These gurus are making their money (millions of dollars) selling their education systems and are so far detached from the real estate world that most couldn’t even do what is being taught in their programs.

There are too many missing pieces in what they teach. What they were teaching was the equivalent of a blueprint for a house with no doors, windows, electrical, or plumbing. They would tell you about the floor, the walls, and the roof and just ignore all of the other missing pieces. But I needed more, the other attendees needed more (and we had been promised more and paid for more). Even if you have never attended a real estate–investing seminar, you can understand my frustration. People were being taken