How to Find Contractors for Flipping Houses
What is it they say about real estate? Location, location, location.,
Real estate is location bound. While you might be able to move the building to another location, you cannot “move” the property itself. Same holds true for contractors. Both are location bound.
Contractors are one of the biggest risks in flipping houses. You need to be able to buy their service cheap enough to make a profit, yet they have to do the job nice enough for you to sell the property. It’s a tall order.
To complicate matters, you need the job done on a tight schedule. Good contractors are often booked out months in advance & charge prices too high for us flippers to make a fair profit.
The Ideal Contractor
The ideal contractor is already working for other investors in the neighborhood your flip is located. If other flippers can make the deal work, their pricing is likely to be geared toward investors, not retail homeowners – who often pay more.
3 Sources of Contractors
- Retail ARV Flipped Houses
- Cash Sales to Investors
- Referrals from Other Investors
Retail ARV Flipped Houses – Go on Zillow and search your area for houses that were recently sold in “renovation quality”. Call the agent who represented the seller (found on Zillow) and ask them if they have contractors who could work on your deal. You may also consider using them for the exit sale – as they know the market and may already have buyers who lost out on the last deal.
This is ideal when you’re working in a brand new market, especially if you’re only going to do that one deal there. Great for out of state flips.
Cash Sales to Investors – Using either the MLS, or Zillow if you don’t have access, you can look at the lowest price houses sold in the area. Review the pics to see if they are in rough shape. Here-you want the most recently closed deals.
Then go drive during work hours to see if contractors are working on the house. This is ideal because you can observe the way they keep the job. Are they working at 4:00? Or already gone? Do they keep the jobsite neat?? Or is it a wreck? When you approach them, are they rude? Or helpful? You can judge quickly whether you’d consider hiring them.
This is ideal when you’re flipping houses in an area you can drive, or a market where you plan to build momentum & contacts to do many deals over the course of several years.
Referrals from Other Investors – Go to real estate networking events and ask around to other investors who flip houses. These are the perfect folks to ask for referrals. To this day, we still use many of the same contractors who were provided by this method way back in 2006. Great guys.
Again, sourcing contractors this way is ideal when you’re flipping houses in an area you can drive, or a market where you plan to build momentum & contacts to do many deals over the course of several years.
Here are 39 properties for sale, many work for fix & flipÂ