I recently completed my first flip project. Here’s the story.

In North Idaho, home sales volume is highly seasonal. Going into the winter, I had few transactions in the pipeline and was motivated to find additional opportunities.

Flipping was the obvious answer. I'm a licensed agent and have done some renovation work, but I'd never bought a property specifically to flip on my own.

In short, I was looking for a property I could afford at a reasonable amount of risk. More specifically, I wanted something:

These parameters helped keep the project within a scope that felt feasible and realistic.

I found the property off-market through a local wholesaler (explained in the next section). Most wholesalers maintain private email or text distribution lists where investors receive notifications of new deals. Joining those lists has been one of the easiest ways to frequently see opportunities.

One day, I got a notification about a house in Spokane that piqued my interest. I preferred to work on the Idaho side, but I kept getting outbid. Spokane offered cheaper homes in a larger market, which worked to my advantage as a first-timer.

I attended the walkthrough but didn’t make an offer right away. I didn’t see any major dealbreakers, but I also wasn’t certain I was up to the challenge of renovating a 100+ year-old home in the winter across state lines.

Turns out there wasn’t a lot of competition for this property, so the wholesaler called me and asked if I wanted to make an offer. I told him where I needed the numbers to be, and we had enough overlap to make the deal happen.

Wholesalers find property owners who have unique motivations to sell, get the property under contract with the owner (off-market, without an agent), and then assign (sell) those purchase contracts to investors.

They add great value to investors who’d rather spend their time and resources flipping properties instead of searching for them.

For me, it was faster and riskier. Luckily, I worked with a reputable, locally based wholesaler to help me through it. Here’s a summary.

This table represents my specific experience and does not apply to all transactions. In a real estate transaction, pretty much everything’s negotiable.

I never interacted with the seller personally, so I can’t say for sure. But judging from the condition of the property and the abandoned belongings, I can make some educated assumptions.

I’d say it was likely an elderly owner who had lived in the home for years (possibly decades), had health issues, was unable to maintain or fix it up, and needed to move somewhere with more support and less maintenance.

Most buyers want move-in ready homes. This home was not. Selling to an investor off-market likely gave the owner the cleanest and simplest way out.

I thought this part was going to be hard. It wasn’t. But it was expensive.

The wholesaler recommended a couple of trusted and local private money lenders (PMLs) that they’d worked with before. I spoke with several to compare their terms.

The lender I chose offered 90% loan-to-cost (LTC), meaning they'd finance 90% of my total project cost. I only needed to bring 10% to the table, which I pulled from a home equity line of credit (HELOC) on my primary residence. So technically, I bought this flip with zero cash out of pocket — just leveraging equity I already had.

Here's what that financing actually cost me:

The loan was for a six-month term, with an option to extend for two additional months… for more fees.

In retrospect, six months was a tight timeline considering the scope of the project, my limited experience, and the real estate market. But it all worked out great.

The lender required insurance, so they were able to refer me to a couple of recommended carriers.

A standard homeowner's policy doesn't cover a vacant, actively renovated property. The carrier I went with specialized in exactly this kind of fix and flip project.

I went with a 12-month policy, prepaid it quarterly, and was refunded at the end for unused premiums after closing.

Yes. I purchased, held title, renovated, and sold entirely in the name of an LLC.

If something were to go wrong, an LLC helps create a legal separation between the project and my personal finances.

To me, it was worth the effort. And it wasn’t much effort. I had an Idaho LLC and had no issues purchasing in WA. Talk to your CPA or attorney before deciding for yourself.

I mostly simply wanted a positive return on investment, and the more the better. I wasn’t looking for an earth-shattering deal that would retire me. Good thing, too, because this one wasn’t it.

I've built enough financial models over the years to know that the math either works or it doesn't. I needed to know the math would math:

After analyzing recent neighborhood sales data, determining the project scope, and calculating holding costs, the numbers landed right in the middle of the “it’s-your-first-project-so-don’t-be-too-picky-and-just-do-it” zone.

Looking back, the acquisition was almost too easy. I expected more barriers, like more skepticism about a wannabe flipper with no track record. Instead I had multiple PMLs ready to lend me money right away.

The hardest part wasn't finding the deal or financing it. Maybe not even the actual renovation itself. It was the weight of knowing that once I signed, I had six months to fix up and sell a 100+ year-old house in disrepair in another state.

Or else get ready to move into it.

With the deal signed, the clock started. Part two is about what happened when I actually got inside the house.

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