Flip Thy House

Flip This…Website?

Is this thing on? Testing testing. Tap tap tap…

I am indeed still alive but in a bit of a holding pattern with many things, real estate investing included. I’m honestly pretty burned out on dealing with contractors, tenants, and city officials at the moment, as none seem able to, you know, do their jobs in either an effective or timely matter. I’d hoped that the holidays would be a good chance to rest and recharge, but it didn’t exactly work out that way.

Work on Larry’s House is getting done, but at a less-than-snail’s pace. (What exactly would that be? Slug’s pace? Sloth’s pace? Inanimate object’s pace?) What should have been a two week job as far as the first stage of work is going on 2 months+, and that’s only after an enormous amount of contractor prodding and delay after delay after delay due to city inspections for a 50 sq. ft. laundry room that I’m adding to a 300 sq. ft. house in the ghetto that was previously abandoned and boarded up.  One would think the city’d be happy that a former crack house is being reclaimed and fixed up, instead of going round and round and round about suitable foundations for additions (even massive 50 sq. ft. ones like mine)  and insisting that we had to produce an engineer’s report at once point to continue work.

It’s also looking like I’ll have to evict one of our tenants, too, as he’s now over 2 months behind in rent. He works construction and has had a hard time of it lately, but he’d managed to always pay up even though he was a week or two late pretty much every month. Rent was due Dec. 15th but he swore he’d have it after Christmas, as he was struggling due to the economy/holidays (he’s married, has four kids), people owed him money for work, yada yada yada. Same song and dance right up to Jan. 15th, at which point he was two months behind, and swearing he’d have all the money next week, etc. I gave him until this weekend, but haven’t heard a peep. I have no desire whatsoever to kick a family out but there’s not much else I can do at this point, as I’ve already played the chump for way too long letting it get to this point as far as being so far behind in rent.

On the positive side, things have really been picking up as far as freelance work, and I’ve been digging back into the world of affiliate marketing as far as developing and building new sites. Without house renovation projects sucking up all my time I’ve been able to revive some of my sites from the mothballs they’d be languishing in, and am easing back into the worlds of website flipping and domain flipping. Which is kind of funny, as it’s pretty much the exact some concept as house flipping, as far as buying websites for sale at various webmaster forums, working assorted magic on them, and then re-selling them at a later date for a profit.

Just like with houses, you can find pretty good deals on websites that are already generating income due to the owners simply needing cash, or people selling sites who did some of the work but lost interest, or just didn’t understand how to properly market or monetize them. A lot of my background is in SEO and linkbuilding, so it’s usually not to hard to find people selling sites making a little bit of money, and buy and improve them to the point where they’re making more than a little bit of money, usually without a ton of work involved.

The general rule of thumb is that sites sell for 5x/average monthly income, so it’s not too hard to pick up websites that are making $2-3/month via Google Adsense ads for $10-$20. I spend a few hours optimizing them, a few hours more promoting them and getting backlinks, an hour or two building out the content, and then just let it run. If it’s in a good niche it’s not too hard to get a site like that up to $30-$40/month from Adsense, which you can turn around and sell for $200-$250.  It’s not quit your day job money, but not a bad way to keep busy during slow times with other freelance work.

So that’s pretty much where things stand in my wee little life. I’m still keeping an eye out for potential real estate deals, but there’s little promising on the MLS at the moment, and it’d take something awfully juicy to suck me back in at this point. We’ve still got a good bit of work to do on Larry’s House so there’s no real rush to pick up another project. Hopefully at some point the house flipping fire will burn white hot again in my bosom, but for now it’s kind of refreshing to not be writing huge checks to people and stressing out over any number of sundry things.