Finding a Home at Auction to Flip: 5 Ultimate Tips

Flipping homes is one of the few gateways to generating wealth reliably that the vast majority of people can do. It doesn’t matter if you’re a lower middle-class individual working a 9 to 5 job or if you’re a wealthy older individual looking to build a comfortable retirement fund. Anyone with the right mindset and a good work ethic can pull it off. But first, you need to find an auction home to flip. A good auction home, worth the effort!

However, just to find the right home does require a lot of work.. If you don’t know how to do it, it does seem inaccessible.

So, to help everyone try their hand at house flipping, here are the 5 tips on how to find an auction home to flip that can make you money, whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned pro.

1: Use the Right Resource

First and foremost, you need to have a large pool of homes to choose from in one convenient location. That is easily the Auction Flippers application.

Auction Flippers brings thousands of property listings to your fingertips, and it makes the bidding process easy. You don’t have to worry about going anywhere to place bids, dealing with auction houses, or seeking out complicated financing. You get on the app, find a property that meets the criteria we’ll talk about later, and start bidding. Everything is extremely streamlined, and that helps you get into property flipping without all the hassles that people have faced for decades.

2: Gauge Acquisition Price vs. Repair Price

When you go to purchase an auction home for flipping, there are two key aspects you need to focus on the most. First, you need to think about the acquisition price. This is how much the home costs. Sometimes, you might find a very cheap house for around $30,000, and you might think that’s a great deal compared to the other low-priced homes in the $80,000 to $120,000 range. Your first thought might be to pick up the cheapest home and fix it up.

However, it’s much more complicated than that.

You also have to consider the cost of fixing it up. Do your due diligence when looking at potential purchases, and see what all you’re going to have to do to the home to make a profit on it. That $30,000 home that is extremely accessible can easily end up costing $100,000 to fix up. Then, you have to consider that if it was that cheap in the first place, there probably isn’t a chance of it selling much higher than what you spent on it due to environmental factors. In the end, you could have purchased one of the more expensive homes in a higher-cost-of-living area, did less work to fix it, and made a much larger profit with just a bit of paint and appliance upgrades.

3: Consider the Location

We touched on this a bit in the previous section, but the home’s location matters a lot. Don’t just go through the auction listings; find something that is within your budget and doesn’t require too much work. Consider where the home is, too.

This is because the location has much to do with the final price you can put on it. A home that you can reliably sell for $150,000 in Missouri can easily fetch $500,000 in a more upscale California neighborhood.

Look for listings that have inexpensive houses in higher-selling areas, so the work you put into it brings it up to the average cost of homes in the area with a large profit margin.

4: Look in Areas People are Moving to

You don’t want to buy a home in a community where everyone is moving out. You’ll have problems selling it. You want to minimize how long you “carry” the house because you will be liable for taxes, upkeep, and financing payments until it’s sold. It’s always a good idea to look in areas where people have a reason to buy homes.

5: Use a Service with Multiple Property Types

You should know that different types of properties can sell better or worse than others, and you have a variety of choices to pick from.  Again, Auction Flippers helps with this. The platform doesn’t just have residential homes. You can also find farmland, undeveloped land, and various other properties to flip that might be better for your ROI.

We hope that we helped you to learn how to find a home at auction to flip. Be smart and make a good choice when buying an auction house!