Karen Rothermich

The Way Investments - Karestone LLC in Kansas City, MO

We found this deal on the Heartland Multiple Listing Service. It’s a small house inside of the small town of Trimble, Missouri which is located just north of the Kansas City Metropolitan Area and is considered a distant suburb/semi-rural area. We purchased the property for $53K and got a loan for $70K our lender only wanted us to spend $17K to rehab. Since this was our first flip, I suppose they were being conservative and wanted to check us out. We used the Home Depot commercial credit card for supplies. Our general contractor would text me, and I would approve purchases directly to this account. This allowed us to have 0% interest in many of the supplies. We put in the remaining funds from our personal account, which only amounted to $8K. The house was built in 1923. 2 bedrooms and a bath were added in 1963. Beautiful hardwood floors were under the nasty, stinky, pet-stained mauve carpet. We gutted the original bedroom and removed all of the carpets. We sanded and re-stained the floors and they turned out beautiful! The kitchen could not be saved. We gutted it, walled off the door to the HVAC system and moved the door to a better location. This allowed for more cabinets, and a refrigerator. It did not have space for one previously. When we gutted the kitchen, we discovered massive water damage to the flooring. We installed 12x24' beautiful marble-looking tile. There was a small linen closet outside of the bathroom, we utilized the space to expand the tiny bathroom. We figured since this was the only bathroom, we needed to make it nice! This home netted us $24K in income. Not bad for our first flip. We paid off the Home Depot card out of the proceeds. We had charged around $10K and paid our contractor about $20K for the total $30K rehab cost. Being conservative, we started small.