I have come to see house flipping as a horrendous scam that kills the economy and is all but sustainable. And real estate agent are complicit and making the problem worse because it’s making them money<p>One of my accountances is a professional house flipper. They claim to regularly make over 100k of profit on a single house in less that 3 months. Keep in mind they contract out all the manual labour.<p>The 1st step is obviously to find a house, preferably before it hits the market. Then, contact the seller’s agent and promise them that if they sell you the house for a good price you’ll go through them when you sell the house after having flipped it. At this point, the agent’s incentive is disconnected from the seller’s: If they can convince to sell off market, they’ll sell quicker, make the commission on a lower price but expects to make a much higher commission on the 2nd sale than what the 1st one would have fetched. The seller gets fucked.<p>Then, the flipper finds the cheapest contractor with immediate availability. cheap+available is usually a bad sign in term of quality. They have them do the minimal work to make the house “look good”. No deep electricity, certainly no plumbing, rooftop or foundations.<p>After a couple of months. Put on the market. At this point, you want to put it on the market at (original price paid+original agent’s fees+second sale agent’s fees+remodel cost+your sizeable margin) that ends up easily increasing the original pricd by 30%, sometimes more.<p>The buyer gets fucked too because they pay extra for shitty work. They’ll have to do more work on the house, both short term and long term.<p>But the ones who get really fucked are the other potential buyers : it’s super hard to find a house that wasn’t flipped, prices go up because everyone wants whatever the neighbors house got sold for, there’s even less contractors available<p>I’m convince flippers have a negative impact on society at large.