Official Carleton H. Sheets^® Website

You wont be in the RE "FLIPPING" game very long until someone will tell you what you are doing is highly illegal.
You will also be told the any buyers you find wont be able to get a mortgage becuase of this thing called SEASONING.

I will explain season later

There are two definitions of what RE Investors call flipping.

The first definition means buying a property and quickly reselling it for a profit. Usually, the property is distressed in some way, and you

I hear it all the time too.  It becomes illegal if you do something illegal, and around here a lot of people do a lot of illegal things.  If you buy a house and repair it, how can that be illegal?  Buy a house and say you repaired it, but didn't  :o

Flipping got a real bad name, when unscruplous sellers were in cahoots with unscrupulous appraisers, who would give an inflated appraisal to the mortgage company. When some of these properties went back to the bank in foreclosures, they began to see a pattern of over-inflated appraisals (buy the same seller, or same appraiser). That was the illegal part.
When you sell, just have your buyer choose their own appraiser. Usually their lender would choose the appraiser, so you're in the clear. Not to worry.
I sold a house one time that I only owned for a few months and the buyers appraiser wanted to know all the improvements I had done in that time. I told him "none". He asked me to justify the $30,000 increase in sales price and I told him "It's what I do for a living and you can see I'm really good at it!". He was able to use comparable sales to justify my sales price without any problem.

The problem is that there are too many ignorant people in the Real Estate profession that don't have the foggiest idea of what they speak of. If someone tells you that flipping is "wrong", ask them these questions. If you buy a share of stock at $5.00 and then sell it at $10, isn't that flipping the stock and isn't it legal? of course they will say yes. Ask them if they buy their house at a $100,000 dollars and they sell it at $150,000, isn't that flipping their primary residence? They will strangely say no, but will say its legal. You all get my point? Because so many people in the Real Estate business meaning brokers, agents, and _title_ companys, are so clueless, they even think that "wholesaling" is "illegal".