Rick Kaluza, a real estate agent with Coldwell Banker in San Francisco, teamed up with Novato, Calif., contractor Vinny Sebastiano.
The keys to success? “It’s knowing your market, finding the right deal that makes sense in the right market,” Kaluza says. “I do stuff in San Francisco or the Peninsula, where I’ve grown up and know the ins and outs of all the neighborhoods. We don’t flip properties in Omaha.”
In San Jose, Calif., real estate agent Alisha Karandikar put her expertise at remodeling investment homes to work with teammate Josh Michaelian, a San Jose real estate investor, buying and fixing up six homes, two of which are hitting the market this week. The rest have already been sold at a profit.
“One was kind of a shell, and the others hadn’t been well maintained,” she says. “They needed complete rehab and renovation. They had really old bathrooms and kitchens, very dated and sometimes trashed inside. One of them, I think they were breeding rabbits in there. That was our guess,” says Karandikar, a San Jose native who has been in the real estate business for the past 17 years.
The home that was a shell was completely rebuilt, she says. “It’s got dark hardwood floors, granite counter tops, darker kitchen cabinets, high-end tile in the bathrooms, nice baseboards and an open family room-kitchen-dining room.”
People who don’t do flips professionally often make the same mistakes, she says.
“They try and go super-cheap and super-fast because they want their money back quickly, which is a problem, because then when you show it to buyers, they can see the shoddy work,” she says.
Forget enlarging the bedroom, she added.
“One of the best things you can do is put in a new kitchen,” she says, standing in front of a contest home now hitting the market, a complete remodel in San Jose. “You want to make your common area kitchen-family room very, very nice and with the open concept everybody loves. You don’t want to be in the kitchen with a wall right here so that when they’re all watching the Warriors game, you’re stuck in the kitchen cooking and you’re kind of out of it.”
Not every house was sold at a big profit. Most made money, but on two houses, two teams broke even.
©2014 San Jose Mercury News (San Jose, Calif.)
Distributed by MCT Information Services
