Your new flipped house will be a disaster…probably

Man. I’ve had my run of poorly flipped houses this year. So many in fact, that they have their own hashtag on Instagram called Mr. Flipper.  If you don’t already follow me there, you should. I see a lot of crazy things every day, and I post them all on Instagram.

I have to admit, I dread inspecting flipped homes just a tad. I think it’s because most of my clients that are buying these houses are young, happy, and excited at the start of the inspection, and sad and depressed at the end of them…most of the time.

Since the busy season in real estate is coming to a close, I wanted to show you some of the awful and crazy stuff I came across while performing a home inspection on a flipped house or two this past summer.  But first, let us talk about what a flip house is.

WHAT IS A FLIP HOUSE?

A flip house is a property purchased with the sole purpose of turning it around and selling it for a profit. These turn-a-rounds are done as fast as possible to minimize the cost to Mr. Flipper.  The longer the home sits, the more money the flipper loses. 

This means the flipper has a financial interest in getting things done as fast as possible in order to make more money. Nowhere in that scenario do they have a vested interest in doing things correctly or even halfway right.

Most of the time, flippers buy these homes in poor condition with the plans of putting lipstick on a pig. They make it look great on the surface, but not so great underneath it all.

THERE ARE TWO WAYS OF DOING THINGS: THE RIGHT WAY, AND AGAIN.

A “good” flip job will always do a couple of things:

1. It will have the bling factor. The kitchen will be bright, shiny, and new, and the bathrooms will look like something out of a high-end Vegas hotel room. The old saying that kitchens and bathrooms sell houses is very true. 

We catch fish with shiny bait, and you my friend, are a 12 lb large-mouth bass to Mr. Flipper.

2. It will make you feel like EVERYTHING has been done already. I hear this line all the time: “You won’t find anything on this home, I bet. Everything has been replaced. It’s basically new.” Yeah, OK.

THE SELLERS DISCLOSURE – LOL!

Nope!  You get no disclosure on a flip house. Well, you get one, but it’s completely useless.

This is because Mr. Flipper has never lived in the home, and in Kentucky (and I’d imagine everywhere else also) they are not expected or required to know anything about the home.

Thus, nearly every disclosure I’ve ever read on a flipped house has “Unknown” checked straight down the page.  These documents are completely useless to the buyer, and the flipper knows this.

On a “regular” sales transaction (where the sellers have occupied the home) they are required to truthfully fill out the disclosure form to the best of their knowledge.

This is where the sellers can tell you if the basement has ever leaked, how old the roof is–important stuff like that.

Just don’t expect any real info from a seller’s disclosure on a flip house.

MR. FLIPPER’S AWESOME WORK

I’ve always wondered if the shoddy work of Mr. Flipper was intentional, or just ignorance. Maybe a bit of both, or maybe I’m giving flippers too much credit.

Let’s get started and you be the judge. Most of these are images, but there are some videos sprinkled in as well. Don’t forget to play them!

What can I say? This is just bad. The best part is that the bulb socket is covered by new vinyl soffit. If you EVER need to get to the wiring, you have to remove the soffit.

This listing touted a new roof. Well, to be fair, it was new. It was just very poorly installed.  Semantics, I suppose…

When I am standing in the front yard and I can see a nice new coat of paint on a chimney, my Spidy-Sense goes crazy.

You simply don’t go through the trouble of climbing on the roof and painting A CHIMNEY if you’re not trying to mask something. You can clearly see the damaged bricks from spalling, which is a sign of moisture damage.

These damaged bricks will need to be replaced. Basically, the whole thing needs to be rebuilt.

Like I said, a new bathroom is standard equipment on a flip house. These are usually equipped with tiled showers, and most of them leak. This disaster was discovered after running the water for about an hour. The tile job was bad, and I just had a feeling it was going to leak. My thermal camera confirmed it.

These surface-mount “sliding barn doors” are popular right now. They are very heavy, and you must hit framing when mounting the tracks. Mr. Flipper missed the mark here, and now things are pulling loose.

95% of life is effort. This flipper failed miserably. You could not see this uncapped HVAC trunk line unless you crawled into the tight crawlspace to see the end of it. On a brighter note, the area was nice and toasty with the heat running straight into it.

Come on, man! You have to be smarter than this. Painting the bottom part of a basement wall is a dead giveaway of water damage. Plus, you know, I can see the mold on the drywall from the driveway.

To be fair, this one only shows up if you look under the house in the crawlspace. Anyone up for a dip?  I’m sure there are only a few electrical wires hanging down in the water. But there may be a few fish as too!

The most important trait of a great contractor is being able to think 10 steps ahead. When you don’t do that, you run into things like this. Mr. Flipper installed this GFCI outlet too low and then installed the vanity on top of it.

When the day comes to replace this outlet, you will have to remove the sink first. In the words of Homer Simpson–Doh!

The devil is always in the details. My OCD was going nuts looking at this shower valve install. If Mr. Flipper is too lazy to center the plumbing on the shower, what kind of mess is behind the wall?

Spray foam works well for lots of things, but stopping a water leak is not one of them. What we have here is a failed SEWAGE line. The old cast iron drain had started to leak and likely needed to be replaced. Mr. Flipper dumped a can of foam on it hoping it would mask the leak.  Nope!

When it comes to HVAC vents, those that you use in your floor are much thicker and robust than those made for the walls. This is so that you can walk on them without the fear of your foot crashing through the floor.  

Mr. Flipper didn’t want to spend the money on one of those sturdy floor models, so he used a paper-thin wall register instead.  Watch your step!

Pro-tip here.  If you are going to install new flooring in your flip house, be sure the door will open after it has been installed.  Mr. Flipper did not take into account that the new layer of flooring would raise the clearance height of the door.  Oops. TAP IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO

You would think a stud finder would be a tool that just about everyone would own.  Well, everyone but me, that is. I can’t go near one without it going off, so for me, they’re useless.  ;)

Here we have the worst kind of plumbing drain.  These flexi-drains are sold at the big box stores.  The only people who use them are homeowners who don’t know any better, and Mr. Flippers who don’t care if your sink drains or not.

The ribs of these pipes will cause lots of problems with draining over time. The moral of the story is that they should not ever be used.

Insulation is kinda important.  That is if you don’t like paying super duper hefty utility bills.  This old place in Louisville was about 120 yrs old and has NEVER had insulation put in. While this blows my mind on many levels, it makes me angry that Mr. Flipper couldn’t be troubled with insulating during the “remodel.”

Maybe they should read my How-to Guide on Blowing Insulation

This one is all kinds of crazy. The roofers from this flip house were really rough with the flue pipe for the furnace. So rough in fact, that they caused it to pull apart in the attic. The danger here is that the exhaust gases from the furnace are now dumping into the attic, which could make it back into the living space.  If that happens, you just may wake up dead.  Carbon Monoxide Poisoning is real.

Composition shingles are heavy. Like, really heavy.  Most roofs weigh about 5.2 pounds per square foot (shingles, underlayment, and plywood.)  

Now, there are a lot of factors when it comes to how big a roof is, but everything I’ve read says the average roof is about 3000 square feet. That means that your roof weighs about 15,000 pounds or about three fully-loaded F-150 trucks.  Now, when your flipper is too lazy (or cheap) strip off the old layers of roof, you get a LOT of weight up there. 

The framing that is holding all that up is not engineered to hold that much weight.  This one is a video for you to see several layers of shingles topped with a metal roof.  Sleep tight!  TAP IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO

I’ll admit it. I don’t like crawlspaces. They are usually nasty, wet, and moldy.  

This particular crawlspace was extra special.  Mr. Flipper had told the buyer they had a mold problem, but it had been repaired. Once I got under the house it, was abundantly clear that the flipper had not spoken the truth.

If you are looking to buy a house with a crawlspace, please take a few minutes and look under there.

You have to be really lazy to not take 12 seconds to tape off an outlet before painting the wall. Good luck plugging anything into this bad boy. Even if you do dig out the paint, the GFCI function is out the window on this one.

Downspouts are critical to the health of your house.  They must be able to drain the water away from the house. I’m pretty sure this one is not draining at all. If anything, this is going to wash out the soil under the driveway. Things will get real ugly in a few years if this is not addressed.

Mr. Flipper could not be troubled with a real cap for this SEWAGE line, so he used a large piece of rubber and a hose clamp to seal the end of the pipe off. I sure hope someone doesn’t poke at it with anything sharp, or you will have poo water draining onto the floor!

To be fair, this is not a real “problem.” It’s just incredibly stupid. Who would install cabinet doors like this?

Mr. Flipper was too cheap to install plywood before installing the vinyl siding on this garage. Plywood sheathing does a couple of things for a building.  1.) It gives the wall the structural support it needs to not rack back and forth (it ties all the 2×4 wall studs together). 2.) It acts as a backer for the siding. Anything coming at this siding at a high velocity will punch right through it.

I find lots of leaking tile showers. One of my tricks is to place toilet paper along the walls and run the tiled shower for 20-30 minutes. You’d be shocked at the number of bad installs I find doing this.  TAP IMAGE TO PLAY VIDEO

Mr. Flipper wanted to install a larger refrigerator in this house, but the kitchen cabinet above the spot was in the way.  No worries, he’ll just cut the bottom floor out of your cabinet.

Mr. Flipper’s tile skills are shining here. This is a whole new level of, “I don’t have talent, and I don’t care.”

Over the years, I’ve come to find out that folks care about things like insulation and being comfortable in their house. Too bad Mr. Flipper doesn’t care about those things for you. Here, via thermal imaging, you can see the glowing hot spots in the wall where he didn’t insulate things well.