What You Should Know Before Buying a Flipped House

I bought my house in 2020 from someone who’d bought it in an auction for half of what I paid for it. It was a flip, meaning I bought it from someone who bought it on the cheap, updated it, and turned it around for a healthy profit. What I know about the house’s history I pieced together from neighborhood gossip and photos on an MLS listing that features water-damaged brown carpets, floor-to-ceiling wood paneling, and dated pastel tiles and wallpaper patterns in the bathrooms and bedrooms. The update gave it new life! The exterior got fresh siding and a pretty cornflower blue door. The contractor outfitted the kitchen with white marble countertops and a geometric brass backsplash. When we closed on our house we felt like we’d found a diamond in the rough, a house we somehow paid close to the asking price for just as the market was going bananas in late 2020.

That the house was a flip made it an attractive prospect. The changes made to a flipped house are generally aesthetic—think freshly painted white walls, trendy brass fixtures, and marble flooring and countertops that look oh so appealing in listing photos. "I always say flips are like lipstick on a pig," says Mark Aakjar, a New York-based home inspector. "[The seller] will try to make it look good superficially, and the buyer will be like ‘oh my god, new windows, new kitchen, new bathrooms.’"

But don’t let the aesthetic updates delude you into thinking you’re buying something that’s actually new. There may be more than meets the eyes, and if you’re buying a flip, there are some key things you should look for.

Hire a Knowledgeable, Experienced Real Estate Agent

Our agent was very knowledgeable, and thanks to my research, we knew before we saw the house in person that it was a flip. That’s not always the case. But your agent should be your first line of defense. In addition to making sure the homes you’re seeing fit your budget and have the right number of bathrooms, they should also make sure you’re seeing good quality homes, flips or not.

"Your agent should be pretty savvy off the bat," Aakjar says. "They’re the front runners before [inspectors] get there, and usually, they also refer [you to inspectors]. So if you have an agent, they'll be the one beforehand to filter out those bad homes because you know, it’s not necessarily your job, your job [as a buyer] to do that."

A good agent will know when a house is not worth pursuing. Maybe they notice structural issues or they can see that there are problems with the foundation. If they’re good, they won’t just be in it for the commission; they’ll tell you when you shouldn’t buy something. Agents are also as good as their Rolodex, and they should be able to recommend a good attorney to help you through closing, and crucially, a good inspector who’ll be able to spot issues in your home (poorly insulated windows, a screen door that doesn’t work, or pipes that are the wrong size) so you can negotiate the price down—or ask for money before you close so you can fix things once you take possession.

Make Sure You Know Whether or Not It’s a Flip

This might sound like a no-brainer, but if you’re looking at a flip, you should know what you’re dealing with. And how do you know? A good agent will be able to tell you. If they don’t have this information, you might want to consider looking for a different agent—knowing things you don’t or can’t know is an agent’s job.

If, for some reason, you’re operating without an agent, there are some things you can scope out independently. Rocket Mortgage suggests looking at the property history, which usually appears with the listing on sites like Zillow or RedFin. If the seller purchased the home within the last year, unless they’ve disclosed a specific reason for why they’re selling (i.e. divorce, death, or garden variety catastrophe), it could be a flip.

There are tells when you’re dealing with a bad flip, too: mismatched or leaky fixtures, clogged drains, outlets that don’t work, flickering lights, and shoddy cabinets that won’t close right or are otherwise uneven.

Seek Information About the Seller

Generally speaking, you should consider some basic facts about the seller. There are companies out there that will buy houses in bulk from tax lien auctions, flip them on the cheap, and sell them for a profit. (Are you buying from an LLC? It might be a flip.) There are also individual flippers, and Aakjar believes the latter is a safer bet.

"If you buy a house that’s a flip, and you want to buy a good quality one, if there's a seller coming by and he's like, ‘my wife and I flipped this place,’ those are the ones I see that people actually put love into," he says.

In other words, flips that have a real individual who’s willing to answer questions and tell you how they approached the renovation behind them are generally better. But the ones backed by a faceless LLC or a larger entity might be worth walking away from.

Look at the Basement

The basement can be the breaking point when it comes to flips. Everything upstairs might be up to snuff, but the basement? That’s when it all falls apart. Aakjar suggests using your five senses when you’re looking downstairs. Does it smell musty? Or can you see evidence of water damage? There might be mold or other problems.

"That’s the most common issue I see," Aakjar says. "Flippers finishing basements that were never designed to be finished." 

Some basements are just meant to be ugly rooms with concrete floors where you store your Christmas decorations and where your boiler lives. Ours, for instance, had been finished but according to our agent, the seller had originally done so without a permit, so they had to tear down the sheetrock to render it technically "unfinished." That wasn’t the worst thing—it also contained some pipes that were too small that a plumber had to later fix and a multitude of issues that seem to never stop.

Last summer, we started seeing mold come up through the cheap vinyl flooring left over from the non-finishing basement finishing portion of the renovation. It felt damp down there. I started literally hearing crickets who must have been attracted by the moisture. The discovery of the mold revealed that the basement lacked a proper drainage system, so we ponied up to waterproof it, the least fun and most necessary way you could possibly spend money. So don’t be like me: look at the basement, smell the basement, and ask tons and tons of questions about the basement.

Ask Questions About the Home’s History

Asking questions, and lots of them, is an important part of purchasing any home. This will help you decide whether you want to buy it at all, or if you take the plunge, it will give you leverage when you’re negotiating. It’s good practice to be even more curious when you’re looking at a flip.

Find out if it’s been a long time since the house has been occupied. If so, you'll know to look out for little details that make the house livable that may be missing. For example, do the windows have screens? Do the bedroom doors lock? Does the HVAC system work as well as it should or does it heat and cool the rooms in your house inconsistently? Also, can you figure out who the contractor was? If it’s a person who’s well reviewed or has a good reputation in the area, that’s a great bet. If it’s just some guy, that’s obviously a riskier prospect.

Look Carefully at Commonly Masked Issues in Flipped Houses

There are some hallmarks of a bad flip, including different height outlets, mismatched fixtures, and fresh paint in some places and old paint elsewhere.

"Some issues that may be masked are mold under the sinks, moisture intrusion in the basement/crawlspace, and multiple layers of roof shingles," says Safety First Home Inspectors’ Mike Totino.

And keep your eagle eyes out for sloppy work like bad paint jobs or shoddy grout work. If they cut corners on the obvious stuff, they may have done the same on the less visible elements like plumbing and electric.

"I would ask the age of the roof, boiler, and furnace and confirm the work was done by a licensed and insured contractor," Totino says. "Flips are fine to purchase, because there are builders who actually do the right job."

Make sure everything was done legally with a permit, too. These are not abnormal questions to ask; they just tend to be the things that some flippers cut corners on. Not every flip is a good flip, sure. But not every flip is a bad one. You just need to know what to look for.

Top Image: Westend61/Getty

Related Reading:

How to Tell If a DIY Project Is Worth Tackling

Read This Before You Decide to Be Your Own General Contractor