Tuesday, July 24, 2012

Flipping A House

Flipping a house is the process by which an investor purchases a house with the money obtained from a low interest mortgage loan, then subsequently sells the house quickly for a profit and repays the mortgage loan before taxes and interest accumulate. Flipping houses caused the mortgage failure of 2007 through 2008 due to the high number of mortgage loans being written to unqualified investors in hopes that they could make profits flipping houses.
Basically mortgage companies got greedy. Instead of writing safe stable loans to people interested in buying homes for the purpose of living in them and paying down the mortgage, they came up with all types of fancy loan modifications so that no money was needed as a down payment on the house. This caused a flurry of investment into houses, driving up the housing prices and generating a large amount of money for everyone involved. The problem came when the only people that were buying houses were people investing money into house flipping. This drove the price up so much it wasn't worth it for people to purchase homes to live in because they were overpriced. When millions of mortgage loans by investors were defaulted on, the mortgage industry collapsed. And thus the mortgage meltdown.
Now is flipping a house entirely bad? No. There is money to be made in the real estate market and right about now with the impending stock market crash due to the European crisis, right now might be the perfect time to invest your money in houses. With the economy slowing down there will be more demand for rental residences and the concurrent receding of the housing market and the stock market will not be equal. The housing market will decline much less than the stock market, strictly because it was already battered so heavily and has not recovered like the stock market has. So my advice to you? Use all your money to buy up cheap houses and convert them into rentals for a couple of years to pay off the mortgage payments, then flip them for some real money in a year or two. It will definitely be worth it.


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