If you’re looking to sell your home for quick cash, there’s a few things you should keep in mind before you do. There are certainly times when this is going to be the best of your available options, but for those that live in San Diego or the Bay Area, where the real estate market is hotter than anywhere else in America, a little patience and prudence can go a long way toward turning a major profit on your house.
Waiting Before You Dump an Inherited Property
If you’ve just inherited a home from a deceased relative, a natural first impulse is to get rid of the home before taking too close of a look at it. But San Francisco and San Diego is home to one of the most lucrative housing markets anywhere in the United States. Even if that house has numerous issues with it and needs major renovations, it can be worth the effort and time to make the necessary upgrades and see how the property does on the market.
There’s a reason why you can sell the property quickly in most major US cities. The reason is that someone will quickly buy up the property, pay you a tiny fraction of the cost, make the necessary renovations to the property in order to get it market ready, and consequently flip it for an enormous profit.
Putting the Necessary Renovations Into an Inherited Property
This is also somewhat tricky. Firstly, the reason why it’s easier for a company to turn a profit by doing all the renovations themselves is because they can perform the renovations at cost. The profit they make is thus determined by their foreknowledge of the market, the neighborhood, the average cost of homes in the neighborhood, and they can also predict how much it’s going to cost to get the property market ready. Without doing a great deal of research, it’s very unlikely that your average person would be able to make a lucrative go at paying a company to perform the renovations and then selling the property.
For this reason, those with homes, most folks who do inherit homes or need to get rid of homes quickly end up selling the property at bargain basement rates and being done with it.
“It’s really difficult to justify putting in a ton of money into a place that you’ve either inherited or want nothing to do with anymore,” says one real estate analyst from the Bay Area. “Problems tend to add up, and some problems are caused by other problems. It’s never as simple as performing the necessary work the inspector says. And it costs more for an individual to outsource that labor than it does for a company who makes money by flipping properties. In the end, it’s more risk than reward.”