Every full-time flipper in Iowa hits this fork eventually: keep general contracting the job yourself, or hand the whole rehab to a GC and buy back your time. I get asked about this more than almost anything else once an investor crosses five or six deals a year. GC your own flip or hire a…
Every flip starts with the same fork in the road, before financing, before the crew shows up: is this a light rehab or a full rehab? Get it wrong and you either overspend on a house that only needed paint and flooring, or you underbudget a gut job and watch your margin disappear around week…
Most of the best flip deals I’ve put under contract never showed up on the MLS. They showed up because I drove past them. Driving for dollars in the Des Moines metro is still one of the most reliable ways to find off-market deals before another investor or a wholesaler gets there first. It costs…
Every few weeks another investor asks me the same question: can you actually flip a house in Iowa with no money down? The short answer is yes, but not the way most people picture it. No money down hard money is not free money. It is a specific way of stacking a hard money loan…
Most of the flips I watch go sideways don’t fail on the purchase price. They fail somewhere between the sledgehammer and the final walk-through, when nobody wrote down exactly what the contractor was supposed to do. A scope of work for a fix and flip is the document that turns your rehab budget from a…
Every flip I’ve ever regretted started with a comp I didn’t trust. I pulled three sales, none of them close enough, and talked myself into a number I wanted to see instead of the number the market was actually paying. Running comps in Des Moines is the single skill that separates a good offer from…
Most first flip mistakes in Iowa don’t show up on the purchase contract. They show up three weeks into the rehab, when the budget is gone and the property still isn’t done. I’ve watched plenty of first-time flippers make the same handful of errors, over and over, on deals that looked solid on paper. The…
You just found a solid three-bedroom bungalow in Beaverdale listed at $185,000, and now you’re stuck between two plans. Rehab it and sell for a profit, or fix it up and hold it as a rental for years of cash flow. That’s the rent vs flip Iowa question every investor eventually runs into, and the…
You found a deal. Now you’re staring at a loan application, wondering what a hard money lender actually wants to see. If you’ve never done this before, that question can feel bigger than the deal itself. Here’s the short version: to qualify for a hard money loan in Iowa, you need a property that pencils,…
Every Iowa flip that goes sideways almost always traces back to the same decision: who you hired to swing the hammer. Learning how to vet a contractor before you sign anything is the one skill that decides whether your rehab budget holds or blows up two weeks into demo. I do not sign with anyone…
