Late-Night Advertisements Warn: Beware of House-Flipping

Seasoned insomniac channel servers can usually resist tempting infomercials hawking wait-there's-more super inventions that are available for a special price only if you call, of course, within the next 10 minutes.

But real estate experts have begun alerting infomercial denizens to add the latest potential get-rich-quick scheme to the roster of products as seen on TV they should be wary of, like miracle wrinkle cures and handy dandy salad-tossers: house flipping.

The TV ads and reality shows can be alluring: Buy a property at, say, $75,000. A few years and several coats of paint later, make a handsome profit.

Just as most advanced skin aging can't be undone for several easy payments, taking a decrepit, cheap property, sprucing it up, and turning dross into gold can sometimes take years — if not decades. Not exactly as easy way to get rich quick as late-night television would have it.

True house flipping — in which an investor purchases a property to hold on until its value increases substantially — can take years and require people to wait a long time.

Real estate gurus Scott Frank and Andy Heller, whose forthcoming book "Buy Even Lower" will be published later this month, are two of the property Cassandras trying to warn people that while real estate can be among the most stable investments, it can also be among the most difficult to process properly.

"An investor really has to do their homework," Mr. Heller said earlier this week. It doesn't matter whether you're buying a single-family home, a condominium or a vacant lot, he said.

The typical story, the authors say, is of a friend-of-a-friend who hit the jackpot by "flipping." But these stories infrequently talk about how much stress can be involved in an investment strategy that might not immediately pay off.

Perhaps worst of all, people who are deluded by a get-rich-quick fantasy often don't consider that their property could be hard to sell because simple repairs can sometimes turn into an extreme makeover, which might itself lead to unexpected costs eating into profits.

But before these factors come into play, Mr. Heller says, investors need to learn to control themselves when they're negotiating in parts of town that are often not where they're familiar with.

"You can control human emotion by pre-establishing your maximum purchase price and making sure that when you negotiate you never exceed that price," Mr. Heller said.

Although house flipping is glorified on cable shows named, not surprisingly, "Flip This House," some house flip schemes have come under state and federal scrutiny.When flipping first started making headlines in the 1990s, critics accused flippers of targeting members of minority groups who are sometimes first-time home buyers and are naive about the true price of a property.