Do you dream of renovating an old property and selling it for big bucks? Experienced pros reveal what they've learned about flipping houses and how to avoid mistakes.
Designers are famous for turning interior lemons into Instagram-worthy limoncello cocktails. So it's no wonder that many turn to home flipping for potential lucrative returns. “My biggest success story was preventing the demolition of a 1920s Tudor home in an established neighborhood in Fort Worth, Texas,” says Dallas designer Jean Liu. She had so much fun working with a contractor on the renovation of their first home that they ended up flipping four more homes together. This particular property had the potential to be a no-go, with broken windows, old plumbing, exposed wiring, and rotten wood. Still, Liu and the contractor saw the ugly duckling as a future swan, and they were right. They bought the home for $600,000, spent another $250,000 on renovations, and sold the property for $1.1 million. “Not a bad paycheck for a side hustle,” Liu says.
In addition to the profits, property flipping has one major perk: no clients. Austin, Texas-based designer Sarah Malek Barney's real estate plans were delayed by the pandemic, but the founder of Band Design finally launched her real estate arm in 2021 and now splits her time between development work and client-facing design projects. “One of the ideas behind it was to not have a client in sight — to be able to have complete creative freedom and carve my own path,” she says.